Tate also praises Barry Morse, who passed away in 2008: ‘Dear Barry. When I came on the show he was established as a star actor. He had been playing in The Fugitive. I’d seen him in other things. He was a man of wonderful poise, of intellect. Barry had much that he could have offered the show, and really wasn’t given the sort of opportunities that he might have been given on it. He was a very private man. He was an intellectual human being who loved fine things, adored his wife … a family man. In many ways he was rather like Professor Bergman; he was interested in so many things. One could always go to him with questions about the script, and he would say to me, “You know, Nick, it isn’t Shakespeare. We just have to try to make the best of it.” I so wanted things to be right, and he knew what it was like to work in fast television, having done American series. He was a joy to work with, a real professional. He gave me, and others on the show, a sense of worth and value, because we valued his opinion and he told us that we were doing a great job. He would work with us when a script problem – or something else – arose; you could go and talk with Barry about it.’
Barbara Bain also fondly recalled Barry Morse: ‘Everything about Barry was so dear. When I first met him he was trying to explain the Brits to me, so he brought in a [newspaper] headline from when he was a kid, and it said, “Storm in the Channel; Continent isolated.” That sums it up; it was very helpful.’
Regarding the reception he and Barbara Bain received in the UK, Martin Landau has said: ‘American actors in England had a reputation for being troublemakers then. And Barbara and I having left Mission: Impossible when we did, the studio had released a bunch of erroneous information about us that made us look like the bad guys. We dealt with the legacy of that and of a lot of the other American television stars that had been in England prior to our coming over. We quickly dismantled the rumour, because once they realised we were hardworking, serious, co-operative and certainly not troublemakers, the whole atmosphere of working on Space: 1999 changed. I mean, all the snobbery broke down. Charles Crichton, who for one period of time directed almost every other show, had also directed The Lavender Hill Mob with Alec Guinness and went on to do A Fish Called Wanda, which he co-wrote with John Cleese. He realised Barbara and I were the most co-operative actors you could find, and in the end we got along wonderfully with everyone, by and large, on the set.’
Barry Morse agreed: ‘The fact that Martin and Barbara had been successful Hollywood actors in Mission: Impossible was impressive in itself, but they are – as anybody who knows them would readily tell you – a couple of wonderfully relaxed professionals, with charming personalities, who don’t have (as so many so-called Hollywood stars do) an inflated sense of their own importance or self-worth. They settled themselves down very readily amongst what was an almost entirely British cast and worked with marvellous equanimity with everybody in the unit. Of course, they were both of them experienced enough through their time with Mission: Impossible to know of the immense stresses that there always are in shooting a weekly television series. They were and are, both Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, first class real pros, as we say in the trade.’
Christopher Penfold recalled of Landau and Bain: ‘They had a very serious interest in the scripts – not unnaturally, being the stars of the show – and they were at pains to ensure that the large roles were written for them. Beyond that, they had a very intelligent input into the kinds of stories that we were writing, and into the way individual scripts went. I enjoyed story meetings with them. There was the requirement for screen time for Martin Landau, but it was entirely appropriate that it should be through him that the philosophical side of the series should be expressed.
‘It was incredibly valuable to have the experience and skill that both Barbara and Martin brought to the process of screenwriting. It was a huge learning experience for me. After we finished at the studios, quite often we would go back to their house in Little Venice and work on the script for the next day until four in the morning. It was an extremely valuable experience for me, and for the show as well. It’s not that often you get that level of commitment and involvement, with an overall determination to get the script right, and to be involved in the process with the two leads of the show as well was absolutely wonderful, and I think it shows … They were very precise about what their characters would do and what they wouldn’t do … I learned more about scriptwriting and script editing from Martin and Barbara in that house than I’ve ever learned since. It was a huge contribution that was made [by Martin and Barbara] to the show, not only in front of the cameras, but in the scripts as well.
‘If you’re writing popular drama series you take constraints on. I mean, Martin is out there at the front of the show. He is being paid a lot of money to do it. He is there because the audience want to see him. That is part of the process of writing for television drama series, where audience identification and loyalty build up episode by episode, and is an important consideration. Of course, once you’ve cast Martin Landau in the lead, you want to make the most of it. My approach to storytelling when I first start talking to other writers who are going to contribute episodes to a series like this, is to say to them, “First of all, tell your story.” Once you know as a writer what you want to write, once you’ve got the essence of it … and it may be more irritating for some people than it is for others, but you don’t really engage in this business without accepting certain parameters. Once you’ve got the story, in essence, it’s actually then relatively easy to crowbar and elbow the story around those kinds of production requirements. It’s not often that the real guts of a story get compromised.’
Johnny Byrne recalled: ‘Barbara was very different off camera – witty, great sense of fun, incredibly kind and caring … Martin and Barbara were highly intelligent, invariably courteous to all and generous to a fault. They were a joy to work with.’
Gerry Anderson simply stated: ‘Both Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were very easy to work with. They were always on time, knew their lines and didn’t bump into the furniture.’
Barbara Bain noted: ‘We were behind the project from the start. The idea enthralled us. We knew the show could make it in prime time – Star Trek had proven that. We dug in and got acquainted with every aspect of the production – script conferences, casting calls, business meetings … The entire project was like a new baby to us … One reason we took the series in London was that it let us go home to the kids. We’d actually be home for dinner every night. That’s unheard of over here. I loved being around the kids, and I wouldn’t have done any TV at that time if I wasn’t able to do that … I had it both ways, working on something that I cared about while keeping in touch with my family.’
What did the cast feel about some of the guest performers who appeared in the show? Barry Morse stated: ‘Some of our guest stars were very good, [but] some were better actors than others …. My dear old friend Peter Cushing appeared as a guest in “Missing Link”, and it was a joy to see him turn up on our show. He and his wife were deeply loving friends of Sydney (my wife) and me. And then there were other people like Joan Collins, she was a big name and was very disciplined and well behaved. I can’t remember, truthfully, any of them that were in any way difficult or objectionable. They all fitted in pretty well … Another guest was Catherine Schell, and she had played a regular role in that other series I had done for Lew Grade called The Adventurer. So I did know her and had worked with her before.’
Johnny Byrne recalled: ‘If it was an Alphan guest star, invariably he or she was going to die. At the rate we were killing people on Moonbase Alpha, they didn’t have to find a new world, because nobody was going to survive!’
Zienia Merton also noted: ‘I thought [the Alphans] kept losing people so often that there must have been an awful lot of empty bedrooms! And wasn’t it nice to see a bedroom in “The Last Enemy”… although originally that scene wasn’t in the show. They’d under-run an awful lot on that episode, so they put it in. I really loved things like that, thou
gh. Like on “Missing Link”, when Wardrobe said, “You’re going to be in pajamas.” I thought, “Great – I’ll get out of that uniform.” Someone just sent me a first season paperback, and it’s not one of the TV episodes, but it starts where we are going to have a play on Alpha and I’m afraid of heights – great! It’s nice when people have failings, because you can identify with it.’
Sylvia Anderson also reflected on the subject of casting the guest roles: ‘At that time, Lew Grade was trying to break away from constantly having to deal with the Americans, and he quite rightly looked to Europe for commercial input. But the Italians were very slow at putting in the money. We’d actually shot six or seven episodes before there was any Italian finance. We hosted a luncheon here at Pinewood [during filming of “Guardian of Piri”] for the people from RAI, and after that some money appeared. Then Lew Grade rang me up and said he wanted me on the first plane to Rome with the casting director to get some Italian influence in the cast. So I rushed off to Rome and found some marvellous actors. But then I had a run-in with Martin Landau, because he’d been holding the fort until then. Eventually, I got my way and cast people like Giancarlo Prete, who treated it all with great humour, but they always knew they had to walk three paces behind Martin Landau.’
What of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson themselves? Johnny Byrne begins: ‘I did a lot of work with Gerry. He was excellent for a writer, because he had a strong sense of story and trusted his instincts enormously. He was highly creative and could make those leaps of imagination, which is very rare in a producer. Gerry’s hard and fast, in the sense that his brilliance is on the technical side, but when you come to story terms, Gerry has very simple ideas, and all the better they are for it. If one was to qualify this effect: Gerry could make a good script infinitely better and make a bad script very much worse.’
Christopher Penfold agreed: ‘Gerry had an incredible capacity for storytelling. He loved telling stories, but the problem with Gerry’s storytelling was that as Executive Producer, once he’d hit upon a story and convinced himself it was going to work, there was very little opportunity for those with him to convince him that maybe it wouldn’t work. A lot of the delays we ran into were really delays caused by Gerry’s inflexibility over what was often a brilliant story idea. He very often had a mindset that made it impossible for him to accept that in principle something was a good idea but there might be some other way around it. That was often a source of conflict. Equally, Gerry was very good when we had those kinds of difficulties in [other writers’] storytelling. He had an ability to cut through a story that had become muddled and inject it with a new sense of purpose. Creatively, he was very strong like that. There was an upside and a downside of Gerry’s effect on the storytelling.
‘I remember Sylvia’s input as being largely to do with the way things looked; the style of the series. She did have good contributions to make in story terms but she was never as good as Gerry in that department. She was very good at enthusing people and encouraging them when difficulties loomed. In actual storytelling terms, I don’t remember Sylvia’s contributions as being terribly significant.’
Barry Morse was always blunt in his appraisal of the Andersons: ‘You have to be concerned about the people, not just the special effects. My character was a kind of space uncle and I was forever being called upon to stand by dreadful diagrams and maps and say, “We are now pointing towards planet Pluto,” or some such boring rubbish, which would lead into special effects. I remember writing a memo one night that said, “Dear Gerry and Sylvia – please remember that geography is about maps; drama is about chaps.” I thought it ought to have been embroidered and set above Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s beds! I’m sorry if this is hurtful to Gerry and Sylvia – but they are not the best producers I’ve ever come across!’
Zienia Merton, by contrast, has said: ‘I thought Sylvia Anderson was terrific. She was a people person. She made her office totally accessible to everybody. She was terribly good. She’s just a born communicator, in terms of making people feel good. She had that capacity to make people feel that they were important, which I think in a series is just invaluable.’
Martin Landau agreed: ‘Sylvia was a charming and gregarious person, always ready for a good laugh, but very bright and serious when necessary. When it came time to do production on the second season, Sylvia’s absence was strongly felt by me, as I liked dealing with her openness and her sensibilities … Gerry was happier with the puppets than he was with the actors, but Sylvia was there. Unfortunately their relationship changed and she suffered more, and we got Fred Freiberger.’
Nick Tate said, ‘Sylvia got a bum deal not getting the second series. She was such a driving force. She was the creative one, the one that loved the actors. Gerry said to me very early on, “I don’t like actors.” And I don’t think he ever changed his mind. But Sylvia said “I love you all,” and she really did.’
The cast enjoyed a positive interaction with the studio crew, as Barbara Bain recalled: ‘It was fun. It was a great set. Our whole relationship to everyone was fantastic. The crew was full of cute, funny people. And we had no trouble communicating, except when you got a guy who spoke with a Cockney accent …’
Martin Landau continued: ‘We had a Cockney first director. He’d say something and I’d go, “Huh?” It didn’t even sound like English. I thought I was in Bulgaria.’
Landau also commented: ‘Our camera operator was a terrific guy, because there was a lot of movement in the show …. The light sometimes is very dim, which means you have to really be good on your marks. When the camera is out there, the focus point really has to be good. …When you’re acting each scene on a different mark, it’s tricky stuff. It wasn’t an easy show to do, is what I’m saying. But we had a good crew. It’s nice for an actor to know he can depend on his camera, and those guys are very important …’
Recalling some of the show’s action sequences, Landau has also said: ‘You can’t have an explosion without gunpowder, and anytime you use gunpowder, that’s dangerous. We blew up a lot of sets.’ Barbara Bain added: ‘One day a piece of fire fell on one of the stunt people. The director ran into the scene and snuffed out the person’s clothes. The man with the suit ignited was actually seen on screen – the director just cut out the part where he put out the fire.’
Of the show’s production executive, Anton Phillips recalled: ‘Reg Hill was a very, very supportive kind of person, in his own quiet way. He helped a lot of people in all sorts of different ways. He’s one of the unsung heroes, I think, of Space: 1999. A good man; a very nice guy.’
Phillips also said: ‘I had a stunt double on the show called Paul Weston, who’s one of the top stunt men in England. In normal life he looks nothing at all like me. I mean, he’s white for a start! He’s 6’3”. Muscles. He’s a big man. By the time Basil got through with him in the makeup department, with an afro wig and dark brownish skin and the same costume and everything else … I remember the first time I saw him he was walking on the set towards me and I thought I was walking towards a mirror. Just for that moment … My wife was in a couple of the episodes of Space: 1999, and on one occasion when she was on the set I said to him, “Go over there and give her a kiss.” And he went up behind her and pecked her on the cheek and she said, ”Oh, hi darling,” and turned and did a double-take before she sort of screamed.’
Phillips has also praised the work of Barry Gray and Keith Wilson: ‘The first time I heard the theme music was probably the first time I saw the first episode. I thought, “This is terrific!” Keith Wilson is really a good person to talk to because he was working long before any of us did. And he designed the set so it could be broken down and [reassembled] in any configuration … so you could suddenly create the hydroponics unit, or Medical, or whatever. All the bits were interchangeable. That was really smart. That was really thinking ahead, because they would work indefinitely.’
Sylvia Anderson also remembered Year One’s musical composer: ‘Barry Gray was a fanta
stic person. He was very unassuming, and if you met him and talked to him you wouldn’t think he had the genius in him that he had. But he lived and breathed music. He lived in a little house with his mother – his marriage had broken up – and the house was full of musical instruments. He was just a fantastic person and a very, very talented musician. We owe a lot to him. I think he knew how we valued him – hopefully he did.’
Regarding stunts, Nick Tate recalled: ‘I insisted that I do all my own stunts. I was very physical and fit and I was humiliated that they would bring in stuntmen. In the very early episodes they did, but they’d always bring in somebody who didn’t look anything like me. The guy was always bald, or he had black hair or a big belly. [A stuntman doesn’t have to have a face like mine], but he has got to have the same silhouette. In the end they said, “You’ve got to have a stuntman,” so Timmy Condrun became my stuntman. I said, “Okay. We’ll ‘hold hands’, we’ll discuss what I’ll do – but I’m going to do it.” So they kind of agreed, and in the end it was okay. We would choreograph the whole thing so that it was completely worked out. I always wanted to work, incidentally, with other stuntmen. I didn’t like fighting with Martin because he wasn’t very [physically] articulate. So I would fight the stuntman and it would be shot from behind his shoulder and you couldn’t see that it wasn’t Martin, and then when they came around to the other angle over my shoulder, it would be Martin. There were those couple of times I had to fight Martin because I went crazy, or he went crazy.’
Destination: Moonbase Alpha Page 31
