Destination: Moonbase Alpha (4 page)

‘Lee Katzin had taken a shine to me during the preparatory shooting and he came up to me and said, “I want you to come and audition for this [regular] role [of Alfonso]. Can you do an Italian accent?” As a young Australian actor, the only Italian I knew was from the Italian greengrocer in Australia, so my Italian accent was hysterical. My audition was quite a joke, and Gerry and Sylvia fell about laughing! At the end they said, “Thank you very much, Nick. We think we’ll just leave you playing the character that you’re playing.” [Lee] suddenly said, “What are we doing? Australian astronauts are up there as well.” Well, the Andersons were dead against that. They said there wouldn’t be any Australians up there! Naturally, I got angry about it and said, “What do you mean there wouldn’t be any Australians up there? Bloody English people trying to tell Australians they shouldn’t be up in space!” I was getting a bit aggressive about it, but Lee thought it was hysterical. He said, “This guy’s perfect – look at the aggression in him!” Then the Andersons said I would sound too much like a Cockney, and that really angered me, because for years Australian actors had always missed out on all the good roles to Cockney actors. I was adamant that an Australian didn’t sound anything like a Cockney, and I demonstrated that very clearly. Finally, the Andersons relented. So I went in with my broad Australian and did this character, and they loved it. By the time I got home, my agent was ringing me saying, “They want you in the series playing not Alfonso Catani, but Alan Carter.”

A similar transformation occurred with the character of Data Analyst Sandra Benes, as actress Zienia Merton explains: ‘It was a very big series when they were starting to do it. Everybody I knew – all my actor friends – were going up for it. I said to my agent, “Look, why can’t I go up for this part?” He said, “No, no. They don’t want you”. So that was three months before they started. Finally, I was doing a television show and my agent rang me up and said, “Can you get to Pinewood tomorrow?” This was a Friday. I said, “No, because I am doing this television show. I’m in the studio.” If you’re in the studio you can’t leave, no matter what happens. So he said, “Well, forget it. It’ll be gone by Monday.” I said, “All right.” Well, Monday he rang me up and said, “Can you get to Pinewood and see Gerry and Sylvia Anderson?” Well, that Monday I went to Pinewood. Tuesday I heard that I was starting the next day, which is very quick, even in our business. And that was it for the next 15 months.

‘I was supposed to be Sandra Sabatini, but by that point they were so desperate that they let me do any accent I felt comfortable in. Well, I’ve got a sort of “Foreign Mark I” accent that covers a multitude of things. Eastern, western, middle Europe, anything where hopefully people won’t listen too carefully and say, “That doesn’t sound like so-and-so.” And I do still remember my first line on Moonbase Alpha, “There is a steep rise in heat levels in Disposal Area One.” And Sandra’s punch line, “This is impossible.” Boom! Next minute the Moon’s gone, right? I actually had to walk while I was saying that, which frightened the life out of me. They did ask me if I could do Italian. I could, but the thing about Italian when you hear it is that it’s a very romantic, musical kind of language. Sandra … was rather clipped. I think she was quite repressed, actually. The way I did it was kind of clipped and matter-of-fact. I thought, as an actress, if I said it with an Italian accent it would, as an ongoing character, actually hold back the dialogue. That’s what I felt. Lee Katzin said to me, “That doesn’t sound Italian.” I said, “No, no, it’s not.” He said, “What do you think you are, then?” I said, “I don’t know. What does it sound like to you?” Lee then said I couldn’t be Sandra Sabatini, because I wasn’t doing an Italian accent. So he said, “What do you want to be called?” I said, “Well, I don’t know a lot of mid-Europeans, so I’m kind of lost. So can you tell me?” He said, “Hey, there’s a great deli in Los Angeles called Benes’ – you’re Sandra Benes.” And that’s how I was born.’

Benjamin Ouma, played by Lon Satton, was the computer expert on Moonbase Alpha. However, Satton was unpopular with some of the other performers in the cast and was replaced by Clifton Jones as David Kano from episode two until the end of the first season. Nick Tate recalled, ‘I don’t really know why Lon Satton was dropped [after the first episode] – I know it was something between him and Martin. I don’t know whether Martin said something to him, or whether Martin just felt that the mix wasn’t right. Martin had a lot of power over the show. I don’t think he had it written in his contract that he could make those kinds of decisions, but he was the driving force of the show.’

Production was co-financed by an Italian network, RAI. It would seem that Lew Grade was keen on these European tie-ups at the time.
Space: 1999
overlapped production with ITC’s
Moses the Lawgiver
, which was also an RAI co-production and was partially shot in Italy. The agreement with RAI stipulated that a certain number of Italian actors receive guest roles throughout the series. They included Gianni Garko in ‘Dragon’s Domain’, Giancarlo Prete in ‘The Troubled Spirit’, Carla Romanelli in ‘Space Brain’ and Orso Maria Guerrini in ‘The Testament of Arkadia’. This caused frustrations for the production as the Italian actors experienced some difficulty with the English language. Voice-over artist Robert Rietty was brought in to re-dub the voice of actor Orso Maria Guerrini. On the positive side, the Italian presence helped solidify the cosmopolitan nature of the crew. Many of the other guest performers hired for various episodes were well known and highly regarded: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Brian Blessed, Joan Collins, Margaret Leighton and Leo McKern, among others.

Rudi Gernreich, a world name in fashion, was hired to design the uniforms for Moonbase Alpha. These costumes featured colour-coded left sleeves, differentiating the sections of Alpha in which their wearers were stationed. Black was Command, White was Medical, Flame (red) was Main Mission, Purple was Security, Yellow was Data,
Orange was Reconnaissance and Brown was Technical. Professor Bergman did not have a coloured sleeve, which meant he was officially a Visitor to Moonbase Alpha. The flared trousers/bellbottoms clearly date
Space: 1999
as being a product of the 1970s.

Barbara Bain recalls the origin of the costumes: ‘When we spoke about who would design the clothes for the series, Sylvia Anderson said that the only American designer she would be interested in approaching was Rudi Gernreich, so I said that he was a very dear, close friend … He was as much a philosopher as a dress designer and his thinking was reflected in the first meetings we had with him. There we were in 1973 talking about what people would be wearing in 1999, and Rudi said that people would be wearing armour and face masks. He thought that the world would become such a hostile place that we would encase ourselves in metal and cover our vulnerable parts. We thought about that, but we couldn’t do that for the show because we wouldn’t have been able to move and we couldn’t wrap our faces.’

Production designer Keith Wilson comments on the costumes: ‘I was told that we were going to have this guy from America to design the clothes and his name was Rudi Gernreich. His [claim] to fame was that he had designed the topless dress. I thought, “What the hell has that got to do with us?” It’s something I’ve always been very bitter about. Obviously, he got paid a huge amount of money to do one drawing, and all that credit … his name at the front, while I was still at the back. So I was very bitter about that … He came over with this one design that was universal. It had to fit everybody. Well, this is fine if you’ve got a beautiful body, but not all of our actors had beautiful bodies. I remember one particular occasion – we were shooting a particular sequence with an actor. He was very young, looked really good in costume, fresh young body … but he needed to wear something under it so it wouldn’t be obscene. I said to Sylvia, “What do we do? He looks great in costume, but we do have a slight problem.” And we had to go and tell him to go and put a jock strap on. Anyway, we had to put up with this costume, and I hated it from the word go. It hadn’t been thought out. It was this one quick little drawing. It looked beautiful on paper, but you put it on people and of course it never worked. When we came to do the second series we very quickly designed bits to go with it. We still had to use the original costume, but we added jackets and badges, anything just to jazz it up.’

Barry Morse was frequently known to talk about the costumes: ‘I felt there was far too much uniformity in the whole structure of the crew and the personnel, which was exemplified by that uniform we all wore. I suggested I
not
wear the same silly uniform we all eventually did wear – but, oh no, that idea didn’t go at all well! Gerry and Sylvia were terribly keen on those dreadful uniforms. That uniformity seeped through, it seemed to me, to everybody in the crew. It was very difficult to distinguish who we all were. What did Nick Tate’s character have about him that could distinguish him or mark him off from Prentis Hancock’s character, or Zienia Merton’s? Never mind me. I felt we were considerably lacking in individuality. I did, I remember, let my hair grow rather long, to indicate Victor had other things on his mind than getting his hair cut or taking care of his appearance. There had not been enough attention paid in the writing, or indeed in the production as a whole, to developing individual characters, which are ultimately the making of any successful dramatic series.’

Keith Wilson also commented on the distinctive orange space suits featured throughout the programme: ‘So much of the action in the series takes place against the stark black-and-white of the Moon’s surface that the suits have been designed to provide contrasting colour, also with the logical reason that those wearing them could be seen clearly.’

Moonbase Alpha itself was a large and self-sustaining lunar colony constructed inside a crater. Built in the design of a wheel, with various sections radiating out from the central hub, the base is undoubtedly the single greatest defining element separating
Space: 1999
from other space-faring science fiction shows in which the protagonists fly around in such ships as the
USS Enterprise
or the
Battlestar Galactica
. The design of Moonbase Alpha is at least partially a tribute to
2001: A Space Odyssey
’s Moonbase Clavius. Buildings of essentially identical shapes make up both bases and, aside from Clavius appearing somewhat more complex and larger than Alpha, they could be the same place. Located in the central hub of the Alpha base was the command tower, and at its heart the vast Main Mission control room, which would be the most important set of Year One.

Brian Johnson discusses designing the exterior of the base: ‘I just imagined a colony on the Moon and visualised a sort of modular construction for the things – but being modular they could be expanded to whatever you wanted; you could take license with them. For Moonbase Alpha I imagined the control centre (Main Mission) would be in the middle and everything else would radiate out from that. I originally envisaged the whole thing being underground, but Gerry Anderson persuaded me that it wouldn’t be visually very exciting if we didn’t show something on the surface. So I added a lot more than I was originally going to, and we made it much bigger than the original. However, this also allowed us to put new areas into the show without anybody realising they weren’t there in the first place. If you have a small complex, people begin to orientate themselves around that, so when you suddenly come up with a new section they say, “Oh, they added that? Where did they get it from?” But our thing was so big, nobody knew where the hell they were anyway. It was like being in a city.’

Keith Wilson recalls his collaborative work with Brian Johnson on Moonbase Alpha: ‘I’ve known Brian Johnson for a long time. He started for Gerry Anderson at the same time that I did. His first series was
Fireball XL5
too. He was [visual effects designer] Derek Meddings’ assistant. I’ve known Brian as long as I’ve been in the business. I knew what he could do and he knew what I could do. We were able to work very well together … When we came to do Moonbase Alpha, I said, “I want to do this style of modular building that will alter the shape of your model”. So, from that point of view, we worked very closely together. But he was at Bray Studios, and I was at Pinewood, so we saw very little of each other, in fact.’

Alpha’s power was produced through a combination of nuclear generators and solar batteries. Food was produced partially through hydroponics, while water and air were recycled. Transport around Alpha was via the Travel Tube, a Moonbase version of a rapid mass-transit system, which received detailed explanation in the 1973 Writer’s Guide.

Displaying more of
Space: 1999
’s inspiration from
2001: A Space Odyssey
, Alpha was equipped with the powerful, speaking X5 Computer, which became a virtual member of the cast. Known as Main Computer, it was often referred to by characters simply as ‘Computer’ – an entity rather than a piece of equipment. In the original drafts of scripts for early episodes such as ‘Black Sun’, Computer was substantially more interactive with other characters and involved in plotlines. Computer even watched the crew via cameras around the base. Looking at these scripts, one can clearly see how inspiration for Computer was derived from
2001
’s HAL-9000. The original Writer’s Guide referred to it as ‘Central Computer’ and focused mostly on its technical aspects.

Moonbase Alpha was equipped with a fleet of Eagle spaceships, which were originally referred to in the Writer’s Guide as the MTU (Multiple Transportation Unit), and described as ‘a workhorse; thoroughly utilitarian spacecraft’. The Eagles are an all-purpose space shuttle/workhorse able to be equipped with a variety of six different service modules. These modules are: