PODCAST 6 - THE PROBLEM WITH SPACE: 1999

Somehow I managed to stagger through reading this in the latest podcast from Lisa and Andrew (available at https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/round-the-archives-episode-24 ) - this is the text for anyone who couldn't understand my burbled nonsense...

PODCAST 6 – THE PROBLEM WITH SPACE: 1999

Against a blank white backdrop, a hero with one black sleeve – and apparently played by a bloke called Martin - stands chisel-jawed, uniformed and uber-dramatically as an inspiring fanfare blares out.

Seconds later, against a black backdrop – presumably to show off her whiter version of the uniform so much better – his missus (Barbara Bain) does much the same.

These are the Landaus, famous already for appearing together in the first three seasons of Mission: Impossible, and, perhaps more famously, for bailing on that same series at the very height of its success.

Something has brought them to a grim and soggy England in those peculiar few post-1960s years, and that something is the lure of Pinewood, Sir Lew Grade, and Gerry Anderson’s latest live-action venture, a vision of the near future set nearly three decades hence on the very brink of a promising new millennium.

Moonbase Alpha is calling to them, and, for the next several years, they will be living in and beyond the space year 1999.

SPACE: 1999 was a huge series in it’s day. Born out of the embers of Gerry Anderson’s “UFO” in the early 1970s, riding on the coat-tails of both 2001: A Space Odyssey and the UK success of “Star Trek”, it was expensive to make, looked expensive onscreen and featured what are still some of the best special effects work ever seen on television.

And yet it remains much unloved and, to certain minds, either a bit too po-faced for it’s own good or quite simply a spectacularly stupid premise.

And yet, when you rewatch that first year, there’s some clever, high concept downright cerebral stuff going on, and, whilst it might be just a touch TOO wordy for the viewer seeking out thrills and spills galore in their television series, at about the time when The Sweeney were burning rubber and running about all over the place in their own version of high-octane drama, it is, of itself, rather well-made stuff, and still features several explosions and lots of fighting - albeit in a slo-mo space-suited science way.

“When Science Geeks Go Mad!” – coming to you soon on Channel Five.

Quite a few years ago, I won the DVD set of the first series in a competition in SFX Magazine. You had to complete a sentence that went something like “If I had built a Moonbase I’d call it…” and I wittily added “…bloody lucky to still be there, five years down the line…!” because this was the early two-thousands and, luckily for us, the moon was still resolutely hanging there in our sky.

Anyway, after all the excitement of that died down, having sampled a favourite or forgotten episode or two, it took me several years - and the arrival of series two on DVD - to get around to actually watching the entire series right the way through from start to finish, but when I did, I was actually rather impressed.

So, as I once again pop in that first episode, “BREAKAWAY” – as far as I know, the only TV pilot named after a biscuit - what is it precisely that we see?

The Eagle Transporter - A thing of beauty

There’s a lot of impressive model work, a lot of exposition, and one massive set-piece that sets up the series and takes the closed world of Alpha Moonbase on a rather incredible journey.

Across a rather languid fifty minutes quite a lot actually happens, although quite a lot of it does happen quite slowly as the influence of Stanley Kubrick is obviously determining how “Space-things” ought to be filmed - if you remember that scene on the space wheel featuring Leonard Rossiter in 2001 – there is lots of thoughtful mumbling in huge empty white sets.

Captions inform us that we are on the dark side of the moon, in the Post-Floyd Space month of September, 1999. Two astronauts with funky space mini-televisions ride in a moon buggy to Nuclear Waste Disposal area two and start loading up things marked with labels saying “Radiation”

I’m sure that’ll end well.

The first words spoken on screen in Space: 1999 are “Professor Bergman” which is interesting given his ultimate eventual disappearance, and we find this elderly gentleman monitoring brain activity with a space doctor who seems quite trembly of lip.

Meanwhile, on a space transporter only very reminiscent of a similar scene in 2001, the new commander of Moonbase Alpha is informed via black and white TV that his appointment has been approved by Commissioner Simmonds, as played by Roy Dotrice, about whom we will be finding out far too much and far too little later on.

They burble on about the “Mission to Meta” seeking out new life on a planet sending signals that might indicate life, and over some beautiful space footage and impressive model work of a probe ship docking, it turns out that they think Meta might have an atmosphere.

If I was them, bandying about phrases like “atmosphere” might be something I’d avoid at the moment, but never mind.

There’s some ominous chat about a virus which mustn’t be allowed to stop the project and, as the thing of beauty that is an Eagle Transporter flies on, already, down below, terrible things are afoot.

Astronaut Nordstrom goes bonkers and has a slo-mo space fight with his colleague before being zapped in a laser doorway. He’s dead long before this, of course, because his space helmet visor opens during the fight, but I guess “One Take Lee” H Katzin” thought nobody would ever notice.

…and then, with a truly thrilling drum roll, the opening titles begin with the aforementioned main stars sequences and a rather spectacular montage to the sound of – I think – the better and certainly more “epic” version of the two theme tunes the series had during its run - using the popular “This Episode” technique which tantalizes without giving too much away in a “Mission: Impossible” way and then segues, via Barry Morse, into the regular “September 13^th 1999” sequence which is also this episode and does rather give the game away.

Not that we cared much when I was eleven. This was far too exciting. Sadly the pace of the episode doesn’t really live up to this for the average eleven year old, but I rather prefer it nowadays.

Like a fine wine, “Breakaway” has matured.

Let us also take a swift and pointless moment to point out the other similarity with “Mission: Impossible” alongside the stars and the preview in the credits and that’s the colon mid-title. Okay, it’s not much, but distinctive punctuation is always worth noting.

Anyway, Koenig arrives on Alpha and we are introduced to the Alphan transportation system, also known as the Travel Tube and, whilst the commander pauses to take a moment, let’s also take a moment to notice those space-age chairs therein.

Exiting the Travel Tube, he greets Victor who somehow “got caught” on Alpha which may be Barry Morse wondering about whether his contract for “The Zoo Gang” somehow got carried over to this series. Still, as he says, “People are dying, John” and that line is delivered with suitable gravitas to ensure that we’re going to rather like the old professor.

Let’s hope he sticks around for the long haul, eh?

There’s a cough and a spit for the late, great Philip Madoc as the departing ex-commander Gorski, wishing his successor good luck and then John Koenig is welcomed back by an impressively diverse crew to the impressively huge Main Mission set like the old friend that Gorski obviously wasn’t.

There’s then some odd science about the non-virus that looks like but isn’t radiation sickness striking down the astronauts, some bonkers astronomy about the current position of Meta and - via the “Oo, I want one of those tiny tellys” magic of commlock porn - we are introduced to Doctor Helena Russell who doesn’t seem all that taken with her new boss, despite his efforts to bond with her over some antique medical equipment.

There’s some chat about unusual brain damage, and the mystery of what’s going on over at Nuclear Disposal Area Two, with lots of thoughtful close-ups and talk about medical risks - and the decision being the Commander’s - in a deft shifting of responsibility from the Doctor.

Next Koenig meets Alan “fair dinkum cobber” Carter, one of the Eagle pilots in an Eagle bay surprisingly buzzing with activity beyond the windows behind him, and whilst Carter worries about the backup crew, there’s more languid thoughtfulness as it becomes apparent that John Koenig has the weight of the world – or at least the moon – upon his rounded shoulders, not helped by another call from that pesky Commissioner Simmonds which leads to some conflict over whether the atomic waste should continue to be sent up from earth.

I don’t know, these days every household must be churning out the wretched stuff. Must be all of those new-fangled microwave ovens, I suppose.

Anyway, politics will out and the priority is still the Meta probe for “reasons” and it turns out that Simmonds told a great big lie about the illness and still insists that it must all be kept very hush hush.

Bloody politicians. We already hope the slimy so-and-so is going to come to a sticky end.

Anyway, instead of delegating, like a true hero of an action series, off Johnny boy goes with Victor to check Area two for radiation leaks, and, as they make the standard navigation turn over area one, their pilot, astronaut Collins, starts to show signs that he too has started to get the twitches, at about the point where the first ad break would have been, probably.

No radiation leaks are found and, whilst there’s some more of that slo-mo acting on the lunar surface, behind John and Vicor we see the twitching hand of Collins who is having eye trouble and, when his eye finally glazes over he goes berserk enough to try and get outside without a space suit and causes the first explosive decompression of the series.

It won’t be the last.

Still, our heroes survive, returning to Main Mission and an upset Carter, whilst Doctor Russell is busy switching off life support for his former colleagues and raising the body count of nine by a further two.

Koenig mulls everything over whilst drinking from a kiddie cup and hearing voiceovers basically telling us the story so far, just in case we missed any of it. Meanwhile, the computer department, currently run by a chap named Boomer and not the more familiar David Kano, who, I suppose, is about to get a spectacular off-screen promotion, sets to work on doing some detective work, with the help of some rather quaint paper printouts. Finally someone notices that Area One is getting far too hot, but it is also far too late and it explodes.

Anyway, after this, John Koenig, like a true hero of an action series, heads off in an Eagle to check things out and a magnetic burst causes him to crash.

After his rescue, Doctor Russell gives him a hard time, telling him that they’re looking for answers, not heroes.

So that’s him told. I don’t imagine he’ll ever do anything like that again.

This, of course, means that, when they discover “Magnetic Energy Forces of Incredible Violence” emanating from Area Two, and there’s a possibility that it will also blow, he won’t be responsible for any more lives and orders everyone in from out on the surface.

Instead a remote control Eagle is sent to monitor the area, leading to some tense scenes as Paul Morrow (“The sun come out, Paul Morrow”) flies it from Main Mission via black and white telly as people look at clipboards meaningfully.

Moonbase Alpha was obviously stocked by a government making severe cutbacks.

Anyway, the Eagle goes “Bang!” rather impressively and Emergency Code Alpha One is called just so that Koenig can sweatily utter the immortal line: “Now we’re sitting on the biggest bomb man’s ever made…!”

The Emergency Code brings Simmonds up from the earth to kick some bottom and, in a big special effects sequence, Eagle Freighters start trying to reduce the mass of radioactive canisters in Area Two, by just dropping them anywhere else whilst Victor worries, although not generally about human follies over environmental impact as it’s still only the early seventies really, so nobody’s all that fussed.

The soundtrack sounds a little bit “Carry On” film here, too, which is odd, but then Carter takes off in an “Eagle One” which clearly has a six written on the door, which probably means that their call sign system is a bit of a farce probably designed by Sir Humphrey Appleby.

Koenig and Simmonds then have an almighty row, in the middle of which, Area Two finally blows up meaning several stunt Alphans get to smash through windows as the bonkers physics mean the rest of them get to do some “pressure of gravity” acting whilst lying on the drama school, sorry, Main Mission floor.

The moon – or at least a cardboard cutout facsimile of the moon - then moves out of orbit as Carter watches. Koenig, like a true hero of an action series, is the only one able to manage to move to respond to Carter’s messages and, as the rest of the pressure compensates, it is left to Victor to explain how Area Two is acting like a huge rocket motor (ahem!) and they are able to watch themselves floating off thanks to the satellite orbiting Mars.

And so it is left to Koenig to ask the computer whether they can make it home and as it rubs down its green Letraset to answer him about contingency plan Exodus it rather helpfully suggests that a Human Decision is required, leaving John Koenig, like a true hero of an action series, to make the big lame speech about them having power, environment, and the possibility of survival if they stay put, and if they improvise without trail plots or full resources, they would be bound to fail to get back, ending with a big rallying cry of, erm,  “In my judgement, we do not try…!”

Inspiring stuff, eh…?

And as the news reports from a devastated earth tells of the party they’re having at finally being rid of this bunch of moribund folk – and losing Commissioner Simmonds as a Brucey Bonus – we find out that there are, or at least were, three hundred people living on Alpha and nobody knows – or cares – whether they have survived.

Meanwhile, signals from Meta are still there to be followed, so they might be achieving their mission, albeit in a slightly different way than planned.

And as Commander Koenig ponders whether their future could well maybe be there – it isn’t but what the hey – he repeats it in voiceover to emphasise that dead end of a plot point as the end credits roll.

I have in front of me a book by John Javna that I picked up in the late 1980s. It’s an American book republished in Britain called “The Best Science Fiction TV”, and, like many such books, it does exactly what it says on the cover, being basically a list of the best of the best chosen by a bunch of American critics.

“Star Trek” is, quite predictably number one and, oddly, “Doctor Who” makes a creditable fifth place after “The Twilight Zone”, “The Outer Limits” and “Hitch-hikers” and so on, down to “The Adventures of Superman” in fifteenth place.

Then, being critics, they also pick the ten worst, and there, right at the top as the all-time worst, is “SPACE: 1999” garnering such helpful comments as “The series wasn’t produced, it was committed like a crime” and “The characters were basically running around like rats in a box, and I got tired of waiting for them to start gnawing on each other…”

Ouch!

So what, basically was wrong with it? What, if anything precisely is the problem with Space:1999? And, if we were to try and remake it today, what exactly would we have to change and put right?

Well, firstly and most obviously, there’s that title to think about. 1999 has come and gone and our lunar exploration adventures have not come to pass in much the way that the world, all excited and geared up by the Apollo missions, might once have predicted would have happened in the next half century, way back in the white heat of the early 1970s.

I’ve heard a few rather lame-sounding suggestions, but time-shifting one hundred years and calling the show “Space: 2099” really doesn’t have the same rhythm to it, in my opinion. Why not just call it “Moonbase Alpha” which does, at least, have a certain recognisable branding attached to it even after all these years.

I also think that the best way to improve the show would be to open it up. Why shouldn’t there also be other moonbases, all the way through to Moonbase Omega and beyond if necessary? After all, both the series “Moonbase Three” and “Star Cops” referred to other moonbases so it does kind of make sense, especially in a closed community. Otherwise you have three hundred people who, given the weekly body count and the lack of breeding that goes on, would dwindle down to just your regulars fairly swiftly.

Somewhere in that three hundred are Brian Blessed and Patrick Mower, by the way, so you do wonder how they’re kept quiet all the time.

After all, it might also explain Tony Verdeschi’s sudden rise to power at the start of series two if he’d been transferred in rather than just hiding in a cupboard for a year.

In fact, if the moon colony consisted of around three hundred thousand people, all scattered about the Sea of Tranquility or somewhere, perhaps running industrial mining operations, or solar farms, the storytelling opportunities are opened up several fold, and some metals being mined would suggest that you could rebuild that limited number of  Eagle transporters that keep getting blown up.

Interestingly, the lack of storylines directly addressing the finite nature of the resources of Moonbase Alpha – especially the human resources - is an interesting problem that the original series seldom addresses, and there’s also rarely a hint of rebellion against the command structure or insurrection either, both of which would be rich dramatic seams to mine.

Also, why are they happy to keep on putting on the uniform every day under such circumstances? And why would you suddenly decide to redesign your uniforms in that situation? And Freiberger knows why the Moonbase Graphic Design Department decided to spend their time redesigning all the moonbase typography to keep them busy.

Still, I suppose that if you’ve got a moonbase graphics department, they have to do something to amuse themselves when surrounded by all those long faces and seriously minded folk being so terrifically calm about absolutely everything coming at them.

This straight-laced bunch of space-science types did tend treat everything terribly earnestly and, ironically, it was the humans who were one of the ways the show tended to alienate its audience in the original.

Attempting to humanise this po-faced crew was arguably the one good idea that the late Freddie Freiberger got right when he came in to allegedly “fix” the show in its second year. That he got it so spectacularly wrong in sidelining so many established characters is unfortunate, but perhaps a discussion for another time, another place.

If anything, if only he could have made MORE of the ensemble cast, maybe the audience might have forgiven many of the other changes he brought in. Although, with the weekly body count being what it was, by the time that second year came along, they could have moved Main Mission inside a wardrobe and still had plenty of room to swing a space alien.

Ah! Maybe that’s where they found Tony? Chief bottle washer, promoted spectacularly in the absence of anyone else being left.

In fact the dwindling resources of the moon colonists really would be a great story arc to follow, as it was in several episodes of the rather excellent “Battlestar Galactica” remake a few years ago. Also, a good science-fiction allegory making us all more aware of our own little spaceship earth with its own limited and increasingly finite resources might not be the worst thing to build a series around.

What this hypothetical “Moonbase Alpha” series also badly needs is some other form of bonkers science to justify the wandering moon whizzing about the universe and visiting a new planet on a weekly basis when it takes ordinary man-made objects decades to even escape the solar system. It doesn’t even need to be particularly good science, just different science. Something that is just about implausible enough to make sense of the plot. After all, Warp Drive is basically nonsense, but it makes enough sense for the Starship Enterprise to go gadding about all over the place.

Maybe something involving Dark Matter, or perhaps the energy release causing a tear in the fabric of space that links all points in the universe through hyperspace portals, or something like that. Something plausibly implausible, if you get my drift? As long as it makes some sort of narrative sense within the show itself, viewers will forgive an awful lot of gobbledegook.

You see, there’s not really a great deal wrong with the ideas behind Space: 1999, as long as you get the characters right, and the situation itself feels vaguely believable. After all, it’s perfectly reasonable that Simmonds could disappear for a couple of months on a tour of the outer limits of a larger Moon Colony in order to further his own political aims within what is now a more finite and lawless world, whereas him just locking himself in a cupboard until the plot needs him again is far more bizarre, unless he had Tony tied up in there leaving Paul Morrow to fill in for him until someone manages to find him.

I do like the idea of outposts. Small lighthouse towers powering the defence screen; tiny lunar farms; specialist fruit growers suddenly realising their own importance; or private mining companies holding the bases to ransom for those much needed rare metals.

Heck, they might even want to explore the after-effects of a massive radiation burst on the community at large, or the frustrations of children who were brought to the moon colonies by their parents and now have no way of getting back home.

So many possibilities opened up simply by expanding the lunar landscape before the accident happens.

The new series might even want to explore what life becomes like for an Earth abandoned by its satellite, or the families left behind insisting upon some attempt at a rescue mission. Heck, the difficulties of life on Earth Post-Moon might be a fascinating spin-off in itself, you never know.

Weirdly, just that opening episode - “Breakaway” - has so many strands running through it, much like was done with “Battlestar”,  a rather excellent six-part mini-series might work terribly well before you even get to the Big Bang. Investigating the mystery virus, preparations for the Mission to Meta, relationship tensions, all of the internal politics with Command replacement, shortage of funds, and Commissioner bloody Simmonds would fill six hours in a very satisfactory manner.

Just don’t let Freddie Freiberger get his hands on it…! 

Martin A W Holmes, May 11th 2018