BY TIM GREAVES
With
Christmas 1970 on the horizon, the UK’s thrilling new sci-fi TV show UFO was
well underway. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's first live-action series, it was set
in the future and revolved around the activities of the Supreme Headquarters
Alien Defence Organisation (SHADO), a covert agency presided over by Commander
Ed Straker (Ed Bishop) to fend off alien attacks on mankind. As a wide-eyed 8-year-old
I was hooked and I can recall wishing two things. One was that I could have one
of the Dinky Toys’ missile-firing SHADO Interceptors, which I thought then (and
still think now) was the coolest among the incredible array of vehicles that
appeared in the show; I’d not be nearly as forgiving today as I was back then
that Dinky had manufactured it in garish green, where the ‘real’ ones on TV
were white. The other wish was that I could somehow watch UFO whenever I wanted
instead of having to wait the week-long eternity between each episode. Now, the
first of these wishes had a pretty good chance of being granted, after all
Christmas was coming and if it didn't materialise then it would only be a few
months more until my birthday. The second wish was… well, frankly it was silly;
the only way to watch episodes whenever one wanted would be to own them and
that was beyond the realms of possibility, literally the stuff of dreams.
Yet here's the thing: Although I never did get that Interceptor toy, almost 20
years later, thanks to a TV run in the early hours of the morning during the
late 1980s, I got to own every episode on video. Then along came the wonders of
DVD and a spiffy Network box set release which suddenly made those
dropout-impaired, off-air VHS recordings completely redundant. It's now almost
half a century since UFO first aired on television in the UK and Christmas has
truly come early this year with Network's upgrade of the show to sparkling
Blu-Ray format.
Throughout
the 1960s the Andersons were best known for a slew of action shows aimed at
children with marionettes as their stars – Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds
and Captain Scarlet remain among the most fondly remembered – and, aside from 1969
TV movie Doppelgänger (aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun), UFO was their
first dalliance with live-action. It was also their first move towards
something aimed at a more mature audience, its storylines touching upon some distinctly
adult themes; not only was there the ever-present core threat of aliens
abducting humans and harvesting their organs to sustain their dying race, there
were flirtations with adultery, divorce, interracial romance and the
recreational use of hallucinogenic drugs, a facet which prevented the final
episode, “The Long Sleepâ€, from being screened during the series' initial run;
it eventually showed up some two years later. The very appearance of the aliens
was disconcertingly sinister, sporting eerie liquid-filled helmets, the viscous
green fluid therein enabling them to breathe. Additionally, the characters
regularly made flawed decisions and not all the stories concluded happily. There
was also a pervasive frisson of sexuality throughout the series; not only were most
of SHADO’s female personnel clad in rather provocative attire, in the first
15-minutes of the show’s pilot episode alone a woman fleeing from aliens tears her
dress and exposes her underwear, moments later there’s a protracted tracking
shot of a young woman's shapely legs as she walks across the studio forecourt, then
Gabrielle Drake performs a semi-striptease (to accompanying wah-wah organ music).
Of course, as a futuristic action series it was still going to harbour huge
appeal with a younger audience and whilst the heavier plot tropes would probably
have by-passed most kids, throwaway dialogue such as "These clouds give
about as much cover as a G-String on a belly dancer" almost certainly flew
right over their heads; at 8-years-old I doubt I even knew what a belly dancer
was, let alone a G-String!
Producer
and co-creator (with Sylvia) of UFO, Gerry Anderson also wrote and directed the
first episode, "Identified". Other directors on the series were David
Lane (8 episodes), Ken Turner (6 episodes), Alan Perry (5 episodes), Jeremy
Summers and David Tomblin (2 episodes each), and Cyril Frankel and Ron Appleton
(a single episode each). As with any series there are great stories and
not-so-great stories, but there isn't a single entry in UFO's run that doesn't
have something intriguing going on. Among my personal favourites are Frankel's
"Timelash", in which Straker arrives at SHADO HQ and finds the entire
establishment frozen in time; Turner's "Ordeal", which finds a key
SHADO member abducted by the aliens and turned into one of their own; Lane's
"A Question of Priorities", in which Straker is torn between the
responsibility of his job and a tragedy in his personal life; and Summers'
"The Psychobombs", wherein the aliens turn several humans into living
explosive devices.
Heading
up the cast, Ed Bishop was the only actor to participate in all 26 episodes but
there were regular appearances by a handful of others, among them Michael
Billington (as Colonel Paul Foster), George Sewell (as Colonel Alec Freeman), Dolores
Mantez (as Nina Barry), Antonia Ellis (as Joan Harrington), Vladek Sheybal (as Dr
Doug Jackson), the aforementioned Gabrielle Drake (as Lieutenant Gay Ellis), Keith
Alexander (as Lieutenant Keith Ford), Wanda Ventham (as Colonel Virginia Lake)
and Ayesha Brough (who, despite the fact she appeared in 19 episodes, was
curiously never given the courtesy of a name).