Catacombs Reference LibraryUK Press
Space 1999 reviews, September 1975
Catacombs Reference Library
Sir Lew Grade's latest international extravaganza is Space 1999 (7.00 most ITV; Saturday 5.50 London, Anglia), a co-production with RAI, the Italian State broadcasting organisation, and already sold to 120 countries. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the husband and wife team responsible for Thunderbirds, and many other kids' cartoons, have devised an ingenious plot about the moon, with humans aboard drifting into space. Space 1999 is billed as the most expensive and spectacular space SF series produced for TV. The models of rockets and electronic gadgetry, and the bangs as the moon blows up, certainly look expensive and are spectacular. But the script is banal: I counted only one joke in the first episode and one in the second; and the acting is weightless. A pity; the original idea was a good one
An expensive space spectacular blasts off tonight.
Sir Lew Grade spent more than £2,500,000 on the new science fiction series SPACE 1999 (I.T.V., most regions 7.0; London on Saturday).
The drama centres on Moonbase Alpha which, with a population of several hundred, is in danger of being blown apart.
The Moon has been used for dumping atomic waste.
Amid all the excitement we meet Moonbase commander John Koenig (Martin Landau), Dr. Helena Russell (Barbara Bain) and Professor Bergman (Barry Morse).
There is a lot of technical Space talk and in spite of the awful danger, no one can be blamed for feeling a sense of tedium.
The characters are a serious-minded bunch and in the first story, "Breakaway", show less individuality than the puppet characters in "Thunderbirds", created by the same producers, Sylvia and Gerry Anderson.
MIRROR VERDICT: Too much gravity, but the series should get into orbit.
Short review from September 1975 in a UK tabloid newspaper (probably Saturday 6th September 1975)
Space 1999 5.50-6.45 ATV to LWT.
Lew Grade's bet is that this one will still be around in 1999 - and with its impressive array of special effects and audio-visual fireworks (by Brian Johnson who did 2001) and the timeless banality of its characters and storylines, that shrewd old showman seems set for a winner. This latest piece of sci-fi nonsense is from the Anderson stable, carefully packaged and guaranteed free from seditious ideas to contaminate youthful minds. The wooden performers of their earlier successes like Thunderbirds and Joe 90 are here replaced by their live counterparts. A multiracial crew of Terrans (led by Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and Barry Morse) find themselves blasted into deep space when their Moon base is pushed out of Earth's orbit by atomic explosions. The series thus set for an endless run through the gamut of science fiction cliches dear to the hearts of its fans. Unfortunately for Londoners it clashes with Dr Who but If you miss it this time round, you can see it again ... and again ... and again ...
Wendy McFadden
This new series from ATV leaves Star Trek light years behind, says DERRICK HILL
YOU HAVE to hand it to space - it certainly has mileage. And that's precisely what a man such as Sir Lew Grade likes about it.
The thing is, a man like ATVs Sir Lew, a true televisonary, wants to be able to stretch himself, wants to be able to lay out about £3,500,000 and then get it all back again, with just that little extra something on top.
And Sir Lew reckons that, if you were to lay all the runs, re-runs and mega-runs of TV space serials end to end, there would still be galactic house room left for another space serial.
Now, after 15 months on the launch pad- 24 months, actually, if you're counting from the first sighted gleam in Grade's eye - Sir Lew's major contribution to the advancement of space sci-fi is about to blast off.
It's called Space 1999, a series of 24 one hour episodes starring Mission Impossible luminaries Martin Landau and his wife, Barbara Bain.
TVs newest space crew have gimmick that they roam through space on a bit - admittedly a big bit- of the moon, and not in a spacecraft.
Landau, as John Koenig, is commander of Moon Base Alpha, the earthling research colony on the moon. As well as being a space laboratory, the moon is being used as a dumping ground for the earth's nuclear waste.
Now this sort of thing is something up with which the dear old moon is only prepared to put for long, and certainly not later than September 9. 1999, on which date its blows its nuclear stack and send that chunk of itself that has Moon Base Alpha attached out into deepest space ... well, out of earth orbit anyway.
This all happens before our very startled eyes in the first, scene-setting episode, and for 23 more, we then view on.
As Moon Base Alpha (Hereafter, if referred to again, to be referred to as 'MBA') has 300 members, the series producers have been able to crack on that people like Joan Collins, Richard Johnson, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Margaret Leighton and other guest stars, are boffining away in various parts of the complex.
Other guest stars, suitably buried beneath tons of day-glo make-up, will be walking in and out the series each week, passing themselves off as the kind of ordinary, everyday space wierdos that people careening about on a bit of the moon are wont to bump into any day of the week.
I hate to kick something that has given so much perverse pleasure to so many, but Space 1999 leaves Star Trek light years behind. Even the loyalest trekkie has to admit that Captain Kirk and Co have gimcrack written all over them.
Space 1999. on the other hand, has that opulent, rosy glow that can only be achieved after vigorous buffing with millions of small, green. paper pieces.
Its special effects are superb; and they should be, for they are work of Brian Johnson, the man who did the same job for Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001 : A Space Odyssey.
The series was created and produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the husband and wife team that gave the puppet series Captain Scarlet, Joe 90, Thunderbirds and others, to a still grateful world.
So, with names like this on its pedigree, it's little wonder that Space 1999 should have bigger and better gimmicks for it.
It even out-guns Trek in the crucial field of flashing coloured lights that go plip-plop all the time, without which space would remain forever unconquered.
Sad to say, it does share with Trek a predilection for flatulent moralising of the trendiest kind. Watchers of deepest space will know that space folk talk like junior primers in sociology and psychology. As with Trek, just let it flow under you.
Also like Trek it has a crew whose composition suggests that it was selected with an eye for world wide distribution. It looks at times like a gathering of a UN sub-committee. Come to think of it, that probably accounts for the flatulence.
Sir Lew, while undoubtedly excited about his new investment ... er, series, is surprisingly modest about it, feeling merely that it's the best thing to hit television since the last ATV series.
No wonder he was disgusted when the American networks turned it down. So what Sir Lew did then - what, in fact his US operator, Abe Mandel did- was to sell the programme to individual stations all over the States - 146 of them so far.
And some of the big stations are so pleased with it they intend putting it on in prime time instead of the offerings of the giants- ABC, NBC and CBS- to whom they are affiliated and whose programmes they are supposed to favour.
By Sue Sellers. Liverpool Daily Post (in Granada ITV region). Ten episodes in, this is the start of December 1975. An unusual discussion of the Anderson's divorce, and the ideas for a second series, including introducing an alien (Freiberger had arrived in October, and his proposal to introduce an alien dates to 25 November).
IF YOU think Ben Hur or Gone With The Wind were expensive epics, consider the cost of Space 1999, an unpretentious hour's entertainment on TV that goes out in Granadaland on Friday evenings.
It has cost ATV and Sir Lew Grade the staggering sum Of £105,000 per episode, or nearly three millions for the set of 24.
To make it, top American TV actors Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were flown over and spent nearly a year filming in Britain. Hundreds of thousands of pounds were lavished on the sort of modular furniture that hasn't been invented yet, but that's going to be a wow in the Ideal Home Exhibition of the year 2,000.
After 10 weeks, the series hasn't even made it into the British Top Twenty of TV shows, but it has still been sold to almost every country in the world that bas TV (more than 100) and to 90 per cent of American stations, and a second multi-million pound series is being considered.
One thing is crystal clear, something, somewhere, inspires an awful lot of confidence in the people who matter.
That something is, most probably the award winning partnership of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, the husband and wife team who created Supercar, Thunderbirds, Stingray, and UFO. They spent three years on Space 1999, writing it together.
Gerry is executive producer of the show, Sylvia is producer. Gerry has the ideas for the "hardware" - though it's actually designed by a man called Brian Johnson. Sylvia designs the clothes and make-up.
Their partnership is unbeatable. Their partner-ship has just, three months ago, bust up.
Their joint film-making company, Century 21 is finished. Sylvia has formed her own company, Da Silva Productions; Gerry has his own company Gerry Anderson Productions. At the moment it looks as though Space 1999 may well be their last joint venture.
"We don't work together now." says Gerry, in his palatial offices at Pinewood Studios. "We're not that civilised." The break up is very recent, very bitter, and it hurts.
"You can talk to one of them." the publicity girl for ATV told me. "but not to both. You can have a photograph of one them, but not a photograph of them together. One of them doesn't mind: but one of them hates it.'
They bad been together for 17 years (Gerry is 47, Sylvia 43). They have three daughters and a son, Gerry, who is eight. Gerry senior, despite the money. despite the palatial offices with potted palms and leather Chesterfields, despite the Rolls Royce, walks around like a man in shellshock.
He is a very honest man, whether taking about his emotions and his broken marriage, or his hopes for the series and his failures. Space 1999, he agrees, has not been a total success; there are things that, looking back he would do differently.
Too much concentration on exotic hardware is, he feels, a mistake. The attraction of computers and space ships, control panels and super-sensitive detectors of this and that, cannot last through a whole series: the characters do, or should
So in the next series, if there is another, there will be an even greater concentration on "human interest." more of a soap opera of the skies.
The basic idea, of a colony on the Moon forced to abandon their home when the Moon is thrust out of orbit, and wandering endlessly through space, is obviously a winner. There is room for all kinds of human drama to develop.
"I feel that perhaps it was a mistake not to introduce an alien early on in the series." says Gerry Anderson reflectively. "Someone like Spock in Star Trek. When I first saw him was completely turned off but I got used to him and now find him one of the most interesting characters.
"On my visit to New York I found myself sitting a table at breakfast with a man who asked with interest about Space 1999 and said how impressed he was with its style and accuracy. I asked who he was and found I was talking to Captain James Lovell, who's twice orbited the moon.
"And Werner Von Braun, the man who developed the techniques that put Americans on the moon, loves the programme.
Anderson is very concerned to keep the programme within the limits of present knowledge, only very slightly extended.
It's vital for the success of the programme that those who watch it can feel such things might happen, if not to them, to their children. So scientific references books, and a host of sympathetic academics are regularly consulted.
With so much money, time, skill, and thought invested in it, its obvious that Space 1999 is far from child's play.
The big question for the future is whether, now the winning partnership has become a solo act, can the Anderson magic still work?
Thursday 2 October 1975.
Part of the fun of Space 1999 (ITV most regions 7.0, others at later dates) is how the residents of Moonbase Alpha, spinning around in Space, find a new world every week and encounter some star of stage and screen already living on it. Tonight's is Brian Blessed, that one-time Fancy Smith of Z-Cars
He plays Dr Cabot Rowland, a survivor of an old Space expedition.
Another survivor who helps to keep the temperature up is the lovely Valerie Leon.
Mirror Verdict: Nice to have those stars in Space.
Thursday 13 November 1975.
Lovely Catherine Schell (left) gets into the Space race tonight.
She plays a mystery woman offering paradise to Commander Koenig and his Moonbase crew in Space 1999 (most ITV areas, 7.0, London and Anglia on Saturday)
She tells Koenig about a blissful world of machines which seems to offer a bright future.
No wonder they're drinking toasts on the Moon.
But there has to be a catch ... and only canny Koenig (Martin Landau) can prevent trouble.
Verdict: Great stuff for older Dr Who fans
The Evening News was a London evening paper, running from 1881 to 1980, when it merged with rival Evening Standard. It switched from broadsheet to tabloid in 1974. This same story was also run in other local papers on the same date, including the Reading Evening Post, Leicester Daily Mercury, Nottingham Evening Post and the Huddersfield Examiner.
ATV are being sued by the giant American corporation Metro-Goldwyn Mayer over a new science fiction series.
The suit filed in Los Angeles, claims a million dollars (£400,000) damages from ATV and the Independent Television Corporation of Maryland, over the series Space 1999 to be screened here and in 100 other countries in September.
The grounds of the claim are that the title "misappropriated property rights," because it is too similar to MGM's award- winning film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The ATV series will star Peter Cushing, Margaret Leighton, Christopher Lee, Anthony Valentine and the husband and wife team of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (Mission Impossible).
Sir Lew Grade, boss of ATV, has spent £2,500,000 on the series with his partners. Italian State television.
Probably 1976. UK inflation peaked at 24% in 1975, dropping to 15% in 1976 and remaining around those levels until the 1980s (for comparison, US inflation peaked at 12% in 1974).
THE FUTURE Is Fantastic, Bigger, Better, More Exciting Than Ever ! proclaims ATV to launch a second season of Space 1999.
What they mean is that the budget has been inflated to £150,000 an episode. making the total cost £600.000 - the most expensive series in TV history.
It also has Catherine Schell, Hungarian baroness by birth, playing the resident out-of-this-world alien.
The script calls for her to be able to turn herself into a lioness, a panther, a tigress, a dove and a dolphin.
Say ATV 'It must be seen to be believed.'