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).
The main locales for UFO's stories were SHADO's two top secret locations, the Harlington-Straker Film Studios (the public face of the organisation, beneath which their main HQ was located) and lunar outpost Moonbase, from where purple-wigged female operatives monitored outer space for any sign of UFOs (‘you-foes’, as the acronym is pronounced in the show) approaching Earth. The idea for the former afforded the production some shrewd cost-cutting measures, with the studio complexes at MGM-British Studios Borehamwood and Pinewood Studios providing readymade, functional sets for a number of exterior scenes. And although it was a first for the Andersons to be using live actors, the range of high-tech craft was brought to life through extensive model work; having been perfected across their other shows during the previous ten years, much of it was the skilled accomplishment of the legendary Derek Meddings.
On one hand a little dated in its vision of the future (now over 30 years in the past!), in many respects UFO feels as fresh today as it did all those years ago and its appeal reaches far beyond hard-boiled Anderson aficionados. That's the power of good story-telling, folks, and as such I'd suggest that audiences discovering it for the first time, as well as those wishing to take a trip down memory lane, will find as much entertainment awaiting them as the die-hards. There's never been a better time to find out just how much than now, with Network's hi-def Blu-Ray presentation hitting the shelves just in time for it to be added to those Christmas letters to Santa. Spread across 6 platters, each of the 26 episodes is formatted in its original 1.33:1 ratio (as was standard for television at the time) and carries its original mono soundtrack along with a 5.1 mix alternative. Supplements include lengthy documentaries (comprising archive materials, interviews and still imagery), unused footage, TV spots and trailers, a couple of commentaries (Gerry Anderson on "Identified" and Ed Bishop on "Sub-Smash"), audio and video featurettes with Bishop and Sylvia Anderson and vast image galleries. As if all that wasn't enough, exclusive to this release is a chunky 600-page book by TV historian/UFO expert Andrew Pixley, a veritable Aladdin's cave of textual information which includes some splendid production photos. The only debit of this upgrade is that the episodes now look so pristine that the wires on the models are more noticeable, plus the amount of Pancake make-up on some of the performers is accentuated and one can't help but be a little distracted on occasion by the eye-shado (sic) some of the male actors are wearing. If you can overlook such negligible deficiencies – of course you can! – then Network's UFO Blu-Ray ranks as one of 2016’s most essential acquisitions.
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