By 1969, legendary British television producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson had established themselves as the masters of action-oriented science fiction for younger audiences using puppets. Programmes like Supercar (1961-1962), Fireball XL5 (1962-1963), Stingray (1964-1965), Thunderbirds (1965-1966), Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-1968) and Joe 90 (1968-1969) had been enthralling young fans with their mix of action, gorgeously designed hardware and unfeasibly large explosions, most of the shows enjoying repeat performances for many years after they were first shown.
But Gerry in particular was hankering to branch out into live action television. He’d made the big screen crime thriller Crossroads to Crime in 1960 and had fallen into puppet shows almost by accident – early programmes like The Adventures of Twizzle (1957-1959), Torchy the Battery Boy (1959-1961) and Four Feather Falls (1960) had never meant to lead to a career in puppetry but that was just how things had worked out. In 1969 he made the live-action science fiction feature film Doppelgänger/Journey to the Far Side of the Sun and the short-lived television series The Secret Service had mixed puppets with some live-action footage (even earlier shows had featured real human hands for close-ups but nothing like this). And now, the time was right to launch his first fully live action series.
UFO was first broadcast in the ATV region of ITV from September 1970 (other regions followed though it seems as if, apart from the opening scene-setting episode, some of them showed the series in any order they fancied) and if ageing memory serves, it was treated as a big deal – Sylvia appeared on a local news magazine programme to show off costumes and models and there’s the faintest memory of an-screen countdown shown throughout the evening ticking down the time “until UFO.” It was sold as the Anderson’s first adult-oriented show and interest was high.
The basic premise is simple enough. In the then futuristic year of 1980, the Earth has come under attack from a dying race of aliens who arrive in the eponymous spaceships (pronounced “youfoes” throughout, not “you eff ohs” as you might expect) to harvest human organs to ensure their continued survival. Ranged against them are SHADO (or, in a classic example of clumsy acronym formation, Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation), a top-secret, multi-national military organisation operating from a hi-tech base hidden beneath the Harlington-Straker film studios in England. Despite the full name of the organisation, there were other outposts too – a base on the moon, where the female operatives (their hair turns purple while on active service for some reason) despatch a trio of Interceptors, each armed with a single torpedo (the UFOs are flying too fast for them to take a second shot) as the Earth’s first line of defence. They’re guided by SID (Space Intruder Detector – Anderson loved his acronyms), an orbiting artificial intelligence and if the invaders get past the Interceptors, there’s always Skydiver, a fleet of three submarine/aircraft hybrids, SHADO Mobiles, armoured personnel carrier that can engage downed UFOs directly, and lots of other firepower that’s taken out of storage as needed.
Against this backdrop, the series told a wide range of stories, from action-packed, hardware-oriented pieces to more personal, almost soap opera-ish takes that barely featured the alien threat at all. The troubled private life of SHADO supremo Ed Straker (Ed Bishop) took up a couple of episodes (his dedication to SHADO ruins his marriage and he has to make a heart-breaking decision when his young son is seriously injured in a traffic accident) while elsewhere senior operative Paul Foster suffers a horrific, almost episode long hallucination, is court-martialled and, along with Straker, cloned by the aliens, and an interceptor is lost as a result of Moonbase commander Gay Ellis (Gabrielle Drake) trying to protect pilot Mark Bradley (Harry Baird) with who she’s romantically involved.
Over the course of 26 episodes, we learn very little about the aliens. They’re humanoid and their skin has been dyed green by an oxygenated liquid in their spacesuits that allows them to survive in Earth’s atmosphere; they can control human minds telepathically, though this was a late-in-the-series development and barely explored; and they’re obviously here to do all manner of terrible things to us to ensure their longevity, though Straker’s explanation about “inherited sterility” in the opening episode, Identified, doesn’t really make sense – if your parents are sterile, how can you inherit the condition from them?
But we never find out where the aliens come from, what they call themselves or how their society is structured. In the episode Close-up, a probe pursues one of the UFOs back to its home world but a fault in the camera means that the images it sends back are worthless. Quite why SHADO didn’t send more probes to the planet now that they’d pinpointed the alien homeworld remains a mystery. Some of the best episodes are those in which the aliens interact with SHADO personnel or even ordinary humans – in Flight Path, Moonbase operative Paul Roper (George Cole) is blackmailed by a human familiar of the aliens, a fellow agent whose mind has been taken over; in A Question of Priorities, director David Lane, an Anderson regular, wrings plenty of suspense from scenes of an old blind woman in a remote cottage in Ireland being menaced by an unspeaking alien (Richard Aylen); and in The Psychobombs, three civilians (Deborah Grant, Mike Pratt and David Collings) are reprogrammed as walking weapons. They even manage to possess a cat in The Cat With Ten Lives.
As with so many Anderson‘s shows, the hardware is the real star, from the glorious UFOs with their distinctive sound effect (created on an ondes Martenot keyboard), to the various ships, gizmos and gadgets that SHADO uses against them. Derek Meddings supervised the special effects and as you’d expect, they’re spectacular. Set-pieces range from a noisy shoot-out between a UFO emerging from a lake and a SHADO Mobile to waves of alien ships damaging SID in an all-out assault on the Earth. Dinky toys of the Interceptors (curiously painted green) and Mobiles (available in blue or green) were high on any young boys wish list for Christmas 1971 shortly after they were released, as were models of Straker’s sleek, futuristic gull-wing car.
And there was another key contribution from Anderson‘s not-so-secret weapon – composer Barry Gray. Gray had been composing for Anderson since The Adventures of Twizzle and he had many a fine theme tune to his name. The Thunderbirds March is iconic to those of a certain age (though his swirling string piece accompanying the “this episode” sequences is even better), the runaway bongos of the Stingray theme promised all manner of excitement that, amazingly, the show actually delivered on, and songs that accompanied Fireball XL5 and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons were huge favourites, the latter being covered by Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1978 during the sessions for their debut album The Scream.
But for UFO, he excelled himself, creating the finest theme tune in his illustrious career. With his signature parping brass underpinned by an insistent, staccato bass line, funky drums and prog rock organ ornamentations, the title cue (see below) is a pulse-pounding, perfectly formed little gem. At the other end of each episode there’s a marvellous, haunting ambient piece under the end credits, a piece that had been written for Doppelgänger the year before (props and costumes were also recycled) and throughout each story there are numerous variations on the main theme. It remains Gray‘s most mature work, even if Thunderbirds is the more iconic theme.
UFO was also the pinnacle of the Anderson’s careers. They would go on to make the much-loved Space: 1999 (1975-1977), which itself grew from an aborted second UFO series which would have seen more of the action switching to Moonbase, but it wasn’t a patch on UFO which suffered at the hands of confused schedulers who weren’t sure what to do with it, shunting it around the schedules trying to work out if it was aimed more at adults than at children, which did nothing to help its viewing figures. Even worse, two of the episodes, The Responsibility Seat and The Long Sleep were deemed too controversial (the former because of a sexy – but still ridiculously chaste – encounter between Straker and a journalist played by Jane Merrow, the latter because of its depiction of drug use) and were shown later in the evening, often long after the main run of episodes had ended.
Today the series may look quaint due to its depiction of a now long-ago 1980 but it remains one of the most exciting television shows ever produced for British television. It was more interesting in its quieter, non-action moments than many of it ilk and when it turned the mood up to 10 it could be a genuinely atmosphere and even quite creepy show. There are moments that have dated, inevitably (there’s some casual sexism, particularly from lecherous second-in-command Alec Freeman (George Sewell) and a hugely optimistic claim that by 1980 racism would have “burned itself out years ago”) but get past those and there’s enough here to gladden the heart of even the most jaded of science fiction TV fans.
In the early 1980s, bits of various episodes of UFO were spliced together to form the video only release Invasion: UFO (1980) and in Italy, where the series seems to have been popular enough to encourage television network RAI to co-finance Space: 1999, five compilation films were made: UFO – Allarme rosso… attacco alla Terra! (1973), UFO – Distruggete Base Luna (1974), UFO – Prendeteli vivi (1974), UFO – Contatto Radar… stanno atterrando…! (1974) and UFO – Annientate SHADO… Uccidete Straker… Stop! (1974). Several attempts have been made over the years to revive the series and a couple of attempts to adapt it for the big screen were announced but have so far come to nothing.
Regular Crew
Directed by: Gerry Anderson, David Lane, David Tomblin, Ken Turner, Alan Perry, Jeremy Summers, Cyril Frankel, Ron Appleton; A Gerry Anderson Century 21 Television production; Format: Gerry & Sylvia Anderson with Reg Hill; Executive Producer: Gerry Anderson; Produced by: Reg Hill; Written by: Gerry Anderson, Sylvia Anderson, Tony Barwick, David Tomblin, Ruric Powell, Alan Fennell, Donald James, Dennis Spooner, Alan Pattillo, Ian Scott Stewart, Terence Feely, Bob Bell; Script Editor: Tony Barwick; Lighting Cameraman: Brendan Stafford; Editors: Mike Campbell, Lee Doig, Harry MacDonald; Music Composed and Directed by: Barry Gray; Century 21 Fashions: Sylvia Anderson; Visual Effects Supervisor: Derek Meddings; Art Director: Bob Bell
Regular Cast
Ed Bishop (Cmdr. Edward Straker); George Sewell (Col. Alec Freeman); Peter Gordeno (Capt. Peter Carlin); Gabrielle Drake (Lt. Gay Ellis); Michael Billington (Col. Paul Foster); Grant Taylor (Gen. James L. Henderson); Wanda Ventham (Col. Virginia Lake); Dolores Mantez (Lt. Nina Barry); Gary Myers (Capt. Lew Waterman); Keith Alexander (Lt. Keith Ford); Ayshea Brough (Lt. Ayshea Johnson); Vladek Sheybal (Dr Douglas Jackson); Antonia Ellis (Lt Joan Harrington); Norma Ronald (Miss Ealand); Harry Baird (Lt Mark Bradley)
The EOFFTV Review 