Catacombs Reference Library
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.