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UK Press
Don't watch this space

Don't watch this space

by Keith Brace, Birmingham Daily Post, 7 October 1975

The episodes are Force Of Life and Death's Other Dominion.

Independent television's expensive, tedious and pretentious science fiction series, Space 1999 has just lost two viewers- myself, by choice, and my eight- year-old boy, by parental diktat.

Believing that science fiction, at its best, is stimulating, educational and fun, and assuming that the seven-to-eight slot is a responsible one, we have let him watch it.

He lost a few hours sleep over the first obligatory horror he watched -a charred and smoking alien walking into the moon station's nuclear pile to sup up enough energy to get back to its own planet.

By lucky chance he was out of the room looking for his pyjamas when last week's obligatory horror was perpetrated- a man, preserved alive for 800 years beneath the ice of strange planet, turning into another charred and smoking corpse when he foolishly left his native atmosphere in a space-ship.

Only this corpse was no stage- horror, no boy's paper jokey shocker, but a carefully constructed, well-thought-out and, to my mind, deeply irresponsible parody of all the worst things that can happen to the human body: rotting flesh, exposed carbonised bones, staring dead eyes on stalks, petrifaction and deliquescence.

Ah- but the defenders of the theory of total explicitness as a necessary conditioning to harsh world may say it is no worse than the napalmed corpses of Vietnam, which the squeamish also object to seeing on television screens.

Yes, it was worse, I think, because it was different in context and intention. The Vietnam corpses were shown in the serious context of news and human crisis and they undoubtedly played a part in making the American public sick of the war.

But Space 1999's nasty little horror was a cheap trick, an admission that the episode had contained no natural drama and excitement, thrown in at the last moment to stir up a series which up to then had looked like a convention of judo experts in practice costume.

A sudden ageing and mummifying, even a simple, every day skeleton, would have made the point in Space 1999 and been sufficiently dramatic. It might even have stirred our sympathy for the man suffering the change.

But the gratuitous nastiness invalidates any claim for the programme to be a serious or even an entertaining picture of the future.

It has a long time to run, but two of us won't be with it, however microscopic (but still measurable) the effect of our absence on the ratings.

ATV to boost jobs with second space series

Birmingham Daily Post, Tuesday 16 December 1975

A second series of 24 one-hour episodes of ATV's Space 1999 is to be produced early next year to give employment to British studio technicians.

Sir Lew Grade, chairman and chief executive of ATV, speaking at a Press luncheon in London yesterday said: "We are aiming at 15 or 20 new films a year. We are very fortunate that we get first opportunity to read books and scripts and decide whether we want them.

"We are going to give a tremendous amount of work to creative talents in this country and throughout the world."

Sir Lew said that the decision to extend the Space 1999 series was influenced by the need to give employment to British technicians in film studios

A start is also to be made in the New Year at Elstree Studios on 24 half- hour programmes on the Muppets, renowned for their appearance in Sesame Street.

The series has been sold to CBS Television's five stations in the United States, and will be sold throughout the world. A series of four one- hour programmes on the life of Disraeli is to be made at the end of next year, and Robert Powell. who portrays Jesus in another ATV epic, is likely to be cast as Disraeli.

Sir Lew also announced plans for six one-hour programmes entitled Frieda the story of Frieda von Richtofen and D. H. Lawrence. Peter O'Toole is to play Lawrence.

The Muppets ran from 1976 to 1981. In the US, the network CBS dropped out and it went straight to syndication, where it was a huge hit. Disraeli: Portrait of a Romantic was released in 1978 and starred Ian McShane. Frieda was not made.