Destination: Moonbase Alpha (46 page)

‘Over the years since
Space: 1999
, I have been to a number of conventions celebrating the series. I often think how very touching it is that this group of young people are so kind and devoted to each other. The initial subject of their coming together – the old series, and their attachment to us actors – is not really that important after all. They’ve become very much involved with each other and regard themselves as virtually members of the same family. I regard those young people as my honorary grandchildren.

‘It is an extraordinary thing to me that just one more television show should have compelled such a nice group of people to have remembered it for such a long time. The conventions are very gentle and peaceful and loving occasions for a whole lot of people of different kinds, statuses and backgrounds being brought and held together by a common interest, but also by a sense of concern and affection for each other. It shows how different members of the human race can come together and wish nothing but good to each other and to the rest of the world. I’m terribly pleased and touched by that. There are many conglomerations of people who come together for much less honourable purposes.’

Johnny Byrne assessed the series: ‘There was a lot of praise, of course, for the technical side of it, which was fully justified. There was a very mixed reaction to the stories themselves. The fans were hooked from day one – I’m talking about the audience as a broad mass. There were certain irritating things about it that made our lives difficult … The problem had to do with the format. Barbara, I think, under the circumstances … did awfully well, and as it went on. It was fully justified, because she came more out of Medical Centre, and was to stay out. They were finding their way and so were we. But sometimes the size of Koenig’s office, that big office that opened out into Main Mission, and the low-pitched conversations, everybody being slightly too nice and respectful … There were certain things that put people off. It was science fiction … I didn’t particularly like the costumes, either. So there were all sorts of reasons why people didn’t accept it for what it was, which I thought was an absolutely astounding television production. It couldn’t be done again and it will never be done again. In no way can that be matched. In retrospect, people are now beginning to see how good it was. If they saw [the episodes] now, many of the issues, the feelings and thoughts that permeate the stories, I think they would find to be more interesting to them now. I don’t know why that is. I think they would find more for their minds to hold onto now than they did then, because they had been conditioned to
Star Trek
.’

Martin Landau said: ‘
Space: 1999
was an interesting show in that it touched on the Moon being used as a garbage dump for nuclear waste. It was only 25 years into the future when we did it. [The human race is], in fact, technologically and emotionally ill equipped to do what we were thrust into on the series. If we wanted to, we couldn’t go into deep space with 300 people. Again, it was only a few years into the future. We were also asking what happens to Earth without the Moon. The last contact we have with the Earth is that there are tidal waves and earthquakes – an interesting concept.’

Sylvia Anderson summarised her thoughts on the series by saying: ‘I think we had a marvellous opportunity. It looked good, but I think you underrate the audience’s intelligence when you have a Commander who’s always right.’

Prentis Hancock reflected: ‘Every time I’ve been involved in anything that is a little more than just entertainment and actually looks into or goes beneath the surface of a subject, it seems to be not just reflecting – as art always does – what is going on in the real world, but almost ahead of it. I don’t believe that art is ahead of [real life]; I just think it’s at the leading edge all the time of what is really happening. And very often public opinion won’t catch up in five or 50 years. In the case of our stories in
Space: 1999
… I think space exploration, in concert with the exploding of the atom bomb and the distribution of the pill, has been the third element that really has made the world be able to see itself as a global village. Of course, the Americans were responsible for that. From the time mankind – we – got off our own planet and were able to look back and actually take it in as being one single entity on which we all must co-exist in harmony or die eventually, perhaps, that has been possibly the most powerful, important element of the 20
th
Century. “Black Sun” always stays with me … “Black Sun” and “Breakaway”, as the two episodes that sort of summed up that idea. Always, when you’re involved with something that matters … you pick up a newspaper and there’s a headline about it and you think, “Where did that come from?” You’re open to what’s going on.’

Nick Tate said: ‘The risk came in the fact that they shot all 24 episodes before showing it to the public. The only people who knew what was going on with the series at the time were Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and the ITC bosses and, of course, the actors who were involved. They took a very big gamble … They didn’t make a pilot episode and test it and show it to millions of people and ask them to write and tell them what was right or wrong about the series. They had great faith in the series. It was a project that they felt would go, and they didn’t want to be influenced by outsiders telling them to do this or that … I thought
Space: 1999
would have been even bigger than it was. We were shooting every episode like a major film. It had a lot of technical excellence and it needed all of that shiny, pristine quality that it had.

‘If you go back to the days of
Space: 1999
, people like Prentis and Zienia and I, we were paid £187 an episode. Well, that’s what I got. Sometimes it wasn’t a week’s pay – often the episodes took two weeks to make. So you can do the math and find out how much we got. We also all had written into our contracts, residuals that they said were based on network sales. Of course,
Space: 1999
was claimed to be the most widely syndicated series in the history of television at the time of its original screening. So that meant that anybody who had a contract that said they got residuals on network sales didn’t get any money, because the show was syndicated. There are no residuals on syndication unless you have syndicated residuals written into your contract. I’ve made a very good living out of this industry; I’ve been very lucky and I’ve had a lot of work and I’ve enjoyed myself immensely. But I haven’t made the sort of money that actors make now.’

Johnny Byrne commented: ‘It’s strange looking back; by rights, if we’d had any sense, we would have committed suicide … But we were travelling on hope and optimism. And we didn’t simply realise how difficult our situation was. We lived on optimism. Whereas the cast could go home at
five o’clock, we often would keep working, sometimes in Gerry’s house. I would wake up with a
Thunderbirds
puppet staring at me. Gerry would have me picked up and delivered and I would spend a day and a night at his house rewriting or writing a script. I think the quickest I ever delivered a first draft was in three days. Yet, it’s important to note that there was no sense of pressure among the writers: we seemed to have an easy life …

‘Chris and I occupied a block away from the main production unit, called the Punishment Block … The only casualty was the secretary in between our two offices – Chris Penfold’s and mine. She went crazy dealing with rewrites, and from five storeys up she threw the typewriter through the window, and had to be taken away. We never saw the poor woman again. There were no computers in those days; every rewritten page had to be retyped, if there was only one line changed. So it was like the problems of today a hundred times over. And we loved every minute of it.’

Barry Morse gave a perceptive summation of his thoughts on
Space: 1999
: ‘I enjoyed working on the series, as I usually do. In a career that now has lasted more than 70 years, I’ve only very rarely had experiences where I wasn’t comfortable and happy with the set-up in which I was working. In this instance we were working with a charmingly professional bunch of actors, most of them much younger than me, and the general atmosphere within the shooting period was really very friendly.

‘One of the most pleasurable aspects of
Space: 1999
was that it recruited an army of fans from all over the world, whom I’ve met in the succeeding years. It’s rather touching to find that there are whole groups of people from all sorts of different countries who are brought together and bound together by a mutual admiration for this series. So, indeed, it had a value from my own personal point of view, in that way, in that I’ve been able in the 30 years since we shot that series to meet the “customers” – the audience – in all sorts of different parts of the world. In normal circumstances, if you do a single television show, you’re not likely to meet the audience in the same way and with the same friendship as I’ve been able to with fans of
Space: 1999
.

‘From my point of view, I had spent well over a year – 16 months – virtually imprisoned in the studio. I felt I wasn’t making the best use of whatever gifts I may have, in playing this rather dull role. I felt I hadn’t created a particularly vivid character for Victor Bergman. It had boiled down to me – as Barry Morse – drifting through and saying whatever was set down for me. The problems that had been built in and created from day one were never successfully solved, in my view. Thus it was, that what could and should have been a most wonderfully imaginative and visionary work of science fiction, never fully lived up to the expectations and hopes I had for it. I thought the whole series was a good opportunity, largely wasted.

‘If – in some future revival of the series – one were to try and explain what happened to Victor Berman and why he was no longer around, one would have to go one of several routes. One would be that he simply died [of old age], because presumably he was the oldest inhabitant of the crew. Another explanation might be that his artificial heart failed and he died. But a more imaginative explanation might be that they touched down somewhere on some or other outer planet and he, Victor Bergman, became deeply fascinated by the lifestyle of these people who lived on this other planet, XYZ. He then decided that the rest of the crew must go on in their explorations and he would remain with the XYZ population. He would study the way they lived, because he felt that it was rather superior to how the normal human race lived! That would have been an interesting development, wouldn’t it? There are all kinds of other ways that his disappearance could be explained, but such a thing was never done in the original series. So it remains a mystery. Whatever happened to Victor Bergman?’

Keith Wilson recalled: ‘What I would have to do, to control the whole series – or the budget of the whole series – was to have script control. I am one of the few designers who has ever had script approval. [I wouldn’t] comment on the script, but I would see it before the actors, before anyone else, to say whether or not I could do it in the time. We had ten days to do each episode. I would look at the script and I would say, “I can’t possibly do this in ten days,” or “This is going to be so expensive.” I would spend money on a particular episode and go over-budget on that episode, but I wouldn’t spend any money on the next one, so it would balance itself out. They had to come up with scripts where I wouldn’t have much to do, every now and again, so I could catch up. Almost every script had one huge new set, every ten days.

‘I used to have lunch every day with the scriptwriters. Because of the nature of the series, I had to have a lot of say. Gerry obviously gave me the say, because he had to. It was no good scriptwriters writing some incredible thing, because I would get a copy of the scripts and I’d walk into Gerry’s office and say, “This is impossible. I can’t do it. I’ve got ten days, I’m already in the middle of a film that’s very difficult and you expect me to do this?” So he used to say, “Well, what can you do? How can we alter it to make it work?” So I would spend a lot of time with the scriptwriters, and two in particular – Chris Penfold and Johnny Byrne. We used to talk every lunchtime. So a lot of ideas for the scriptwriters, particularly with those two scriptwriters, would spring from our conversations. I was always very keen on doing monsters and that sort of thing, because I felt that was what the public wanted. Whether I was right or wrong is another thing … We did things on
Space: 1999
that other people would hesitate to do even in a big feature film. With the budget that we had, I think we did very well.

‘I loved the series. I loved doing the show, because I had so much freedom. There was nobody to tell me what to do. Not even Gerry Anderson. Nobody. I had total freedom with the look, costumes, hair, make-up … absolutely everything. So, for me,
Space: 1999
was a high. It’s one of my favourite productions I’ve ever worked on.’

Sylvia Anderson said: ‘I can only comment on the shows that I was involved in, and my battle, or my side, was always to develop the characters. I considered that however brilliant your effects are, if you don’t care about the characters you don’t have anything. And that’s what happened years ago – you couldn’t get a highly regarded actor to appear in a science fiction movie because usually people concentrated on effects and forgot about the characters … For that reason I’m not a great science fiction fan, I have to say, unless it’s something really stunning. As I was saying, years ago you couldn’t get good actors – they didn’t want to appear as competing with the effects. But gradually we’re getting rid of that idea and trying to build the characters to match the effects … After the first series, as everybody knows, Gerry and I went our separate ways and I wanted to do something completely different. And so I wrote my first novel, which was called
Love and Hisses
. It was quite successful and I was quite proud of that, because writing has always been the thing that I’ve enjoyed the best.’