Cast members have frequently praised the show’s directors. Barry Morse, for instance, noted: ‘Our directors on Space: 1999 varied in their different ways. Most of us knew Charlie Crichton and his fine reputation as a director of some of the famous Ealing comedy films. Charlie passed away in September 1999. Ray Austin had been originally a stuntman in our profession and has directed a great deal of television in the United States. Lee Katzin was notable for the fact he directed the initial episode, “Breakaway”, which took twice as long as almost any other, running absurdly over schedule. I think there may have been good reasons on Gerry’s and Sylvia’s part that he didn’t figure as a director on more than one episode after that first one. He shouldn’t be entirely blamed for [the overrun], though, because he was confronting material put together with all too little preparation. David Tomblin I remember quite well. He was a good, sympathetic director of actors. Bob Kellett was a pleasant chap as well. They were all very good, workmanlike directors.’
Martin Landau said: ‘Charles Crichton, who directed every third episode of our show, was a great comedy director. The only work he could get in the ’70s was on our show. We were thrilled to have him. You’re talking about a greatdirector who wound up doing a science fiction television series …In the beginning when we first got there, Barbara and I were the colonists. We were outsiders. Charlie Crichton was a bit standoffish at first. I’m pretty tactile – I like to shake hands and touch and stuff – so I would say hello and shake his hand, and at night before I left I’d shake his hand again, until one day he exploded, “What is all this? You’re not going to India, for God’s sakes. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” But about six months after the series, he would come and put his arm around me and stick his hand out. So I Americanised him. We had good directors … but he was wonderful. He was awesome. I liked him; I wound up being really very fond of him … I loved working on that show. We had a great time. I sort of instigated that.’
Nick Tate said, ‘Charlie Crichton was a really good director and a nice man. A very idiosyncratic, funny man … He used to have a Volvo that he would drive. And Charlie would get absolutely tanked every night after the show, and then drive this Volvo home. He was so drunk he couldn’t stand up. I don’t know how in God’s name he got home in that car.’
Landau also remembered Crichton’s drinking: ‘You gotta know, too, that his licence was taken away twice during our show. He was without a licence two times because of DUIs, as we call them here. Driving under the influence …
‘[Charlie Crichton] was a funny guy. I once saw Charlie at a party at Pinewood, on the second floor, and I saw him in the doorway, teetering and falling, and I ran … There was a marble staircase there in that big building. Charlie had fallen down the staircase and had landed on his feet, and was waddling away. If he hadn’t have been drunk he would have been dead!’
Zienia Merton recalls an amusing story regarding one director: ‘There was one episode Ray Austin was directing, and in one scene we went into God knows how many takes, because I giggled. I got terrible giggles. I had to be standing there, looking terribly serious, and I kept laughing. Ray, instead of telling me to stop, set me up! He got a piece of paper and attached it to his head, saying “Don’t laugh!” I was trying so hard. I wasn’t looking until the last minute, until he said, “Action.” Then I saw this ”Don’t laugh!” thing. They also put things on my desk – pictures of naked men and things like that – just to try and make me laugh. We had to do 15 or 20 takes on that one. In the rushes the next day there was Take One, when I started to giggle, and they said, “Cut.” The next take was like Take 18 – and it looked as if I’d been laughing for 18 takes. But it wasn’t my fault; it was Ray Austin’s and the camera crew’s!’
Nick Tate recalled Lee Katzin fondly: ‘I loved him. He cast me in the show … He seemed to personify the attitude – at least for me, having come from another country – of an American director. He just epitomised that to me. He had authority, panache, knowledge, inventiveness; he was courageous; he was friendly, and just everything about him was awe-inspiring.’
Nick Tate shared another anecdote: ‘Martin [Landau] worked only in left profile – you never saw Martin’s right profile unless it was just moving quickly through the frame. If he had to come and stand here on my right side and turn and talk to me so that his right profile was showing, he’d walk in and around me – always. And I had this hang-up about my right profile, so initially I felt, “What am I going to do? I’ve got to work with him all the time.” It completely cured me of my hang-up about my right profile, because I was in right profile throughout the entirety of Space: 1999! … It proved in the end to be great for me because it stopped that stupidity. It’s really ridiculous. Ray Austin, the director, used to get furious with Martin, because he’d set up a scene and he wanted it to work in a particular way and Martin would always walk around [to a left-profile vantage point] and Ray would say, “No – I want you over here!” Ray would get so angry with him, but Martin wouldn’t give in. In many ways, Martin was a real pussycat. I understand these foibles that he had; in many ways, it was rather sweet and childish. He just couldn’t help himself – these were things he wanted and things he had to have, and it was his show. He said to me, “Nick, I had to put up with all that when I was in Mission: Impossible. I wasn’t the lead of that show – I was one of the guys. This is my show, and I’m going to have it my way. When it’s your show you can have it your way.” But you know, even if it was my show, I swear to God I wouldn’t do those things. Because it’s detrimental to yourself: in the end, you just have to let go. There are other great people around you that support you.’
Johnny Byrne stated: ‘As we see watching Space: 1999, when [the episodes] were good they could be very good. The directors brought so much to the scripts that we wrote as writers. And the actors, the artists, brought so much to the words and the characterisation.’
ITC AND COMPARISONS
Regarding ITC, Christopher Penfold has stated: ‘Every time an episode was completed in script form it would be shipped off to ITC and they would make their comments. Unfortunately Gerry was very much in thrall to ITC when he felt his relationship with them was threatened. This was where a lot of disputes rose. Often what happened was that we’d finally get a script we were all pleased with; Gerry was pleased with it, Martin was pleased with it and Charles was pleased with it. Off it went to ITC and back it came with comments that just tore at the fundamental structure of the thing. Gerry would say, “Back to the drawing board …”
‘It was very demoralising to have to respond to that. We all felt that sufficient homage had been paid to the requirements of the American market in the way the whole thing had been set up in the first place. We also all felt that the way to succeed in the American market was actually to inject the quality of difference and the originality that we all had to bring to it … I found I was publishing scripts that I didn’t myself believe in one hundred percent. It became more and more impossible for me to stay there, and Gerry and Sylvia realised that.’
The cast and crew also had certain difficulties in dealing with ITC, as Zienia Merton recalls: ‘We used to get this a lot in the first year. If they thought one of us might be getting out of line, they would say, “Somebody in America [at ITC] doesn’t like you.” And you were meant to be very, very frightened and just keep quiet. It used to be used as a threat now and again, like a big stick. Someone in America – they never told you who it was. It was, “This faceless person, who could actually kill you, doesn’t like you, in America.” It was brought out every now and again.’
Christopher Penfold added: ‘I think that, as a person responsible for the making of a television drama series, you have an expression of faith in the product that you are putting your life into. The best of what we see on television are the successful expressions of those acts of faith. They’re often original ideas and they almost invariably originate from the creative writer, not from a television executive. I think, as
Johnny has said, that we actually snuck one in under the wire on the first series. The eye of the network, the eye of ITC, was not immediately upon us. So I think we evolved – in a fairly short space of time – a fairly coherent and quite ambitious idea of what we could achieve in this new [show]. And it was something to which we were passionately committed.
‘I remember feelings of great dread when I saw a big car draw up outside the studios at Pinewood and the boot open and the film cans of the first episode went into this car, which was driven by a man who was at the time a lackey for Abe Mandell at ITC. This car took the first episode (or perhaps the first two episodes) off to be screened in front of what I think would now be called a focus group. My feeling about focus groups is that they are entirely [opposed to] the creative vision of the original writer. People who watch television without creating it – their yardsticks are what they last saw on television, or what they’re accustomed to seeing on television. If what they are looking at is a piece of original work, which is surprising to them, initially their response is probably going to be negative. But I think the great television successes have been those programmes that have had the tenacity to hold on to that original vision in the face of some initial audience opposition. Gradually the audience comes around to it, warms to it and realises what that original vision was. Then they get behind it.
‘What happened in the case of the first series of Space: 1999 was that quite creative vision was constantly being eviscerated by negative responses from focus groups in Los Angeles or wherever they were. It was, I think, quite discouraging for us to receive the results of those. I mean, we would have received the results of the focus groups without too much trepidation, but when they came also with direct orders to change direction … then we felt pretty sad about that … It was very dispiriting to feel that time and again when our work was assessed the criteria being used were existing shows of a similar kind. We felt the secret of success was to make it that much different.’
Zienia Merton agreed that Space: 1999 was unfairly compared to Star Trek: ‘It’s a different thing. Okay, they’re both about space … But it was a totally different mentality in Trek to Space. The way we think to the way the Americans think.’
Nick Tate has said: ‘I hadn’t been a fan of Star Trek. When I was asked to do Space: 1999, I don’t think I’d seen more than one episode of Star Trek, and I thought it was kind of like a pantomime in space. (I hated it when Fred Freiberger later tried to do that to Space: 1999 …) So I didn’t know much about Star Trek, but I did love cowboy movies and adventure stories. So when I was asked to audition for Space: 1999, the whole macho concept of being an astronaut was something that I found exciting. I never thought of the parallels between what Space: 1999 was and what I’d known Star Trek to be. No-one ever mentioned it. We weren’t trying to parallel it in any way. Space: 1999 was intended to be a story of fact. Whilst it was science fiction, they tried very hard to make us believe that what we were dealing with was all real science. Everything we tried to do in the beginnings of Space: 1999 was very possible and just how it would be. But we had to spice it up with some drama.’
Barry Morse commented: ‘The roles of women – both stars and guest stars – were larger in Space: 1999 than in other science fiction series before or since, including Star Trek. I have no idea if this had anything to do with Sylvia Anderson being credited as producer. I hope this was one forward-looking idea of our series. Even when we were shooting it, women’s roles in society generally were not as substantial or as powerful as they are now – although they were beginning to be.’
Martin Landau stated: ‘Science fiction is a literary form. A good writer can create a world in three paragraphs, and then the reader’s mind can do anything with it. The danger is to disappoint in the visualisation. But we’ve created a world different from anything seen before on TV. Like Star Trek, we [present] contact with mind-bending, incredible things, but that show was [set] two thousand years into the future with everyone running around in a ship that could do all kinds of things. We’re victims, something like pioneers, more identifiable as people … The important asset of Space: 1999 is that it’s set in 1999, not 200 years in the future. My guy was born in the 1950s. He grew up with the likes of John Glenn. Space: 1999 is rooted in the present. We have taken a bunch of contemporary people and sent them flying, out of control, through space. We can’t say, “Hey, let’s go there, because that looks nice.” Star Trek was kind of macho in a way. They had this big ship with big weapons that could destroy planets. We’re at the mercy of everyone we encounter.’
Sylvia Anderson welcomed Space: 1999 being compared to another famous science fiction production: ‘Someone said that Space: 1999 was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 every week. I thought that was the best – the most flattering – thing they could say about us.’
Regarding Space: 1999’s influences, Christopher Penfold observed: ‘Actually, [Isaac Asimov’s] Foundation I think is pretty seminal to a lot of what we were trying to do in Space: 1999; I think it’s an absolute masterpiece. The notion of Foundation in relation to our world is a pretty powerful one and a pretty challenging one, even now. The kinds of things that Asimov was engaging with there – and seeing the success that he achieved in attempting to engage with those ideas – certainly encouraged us. We were of course aware of Star Trek. Science fiction is certainly an evolving genre. Isn’t there a continual enquiry amongst us about where we will be in the future? I think that the great satirists of the 18th Century were writing science fiction in a way. Extrapolation from the contemporary into the future in order to look back at the way we live now and to ask questions about it, is something we will always be doing.’
Barry Morse also shared his thoughts on science fiction: ‘It’s not too difficult to direct or act William Shakespeare because if you ensure that the words are adequately heard, he’ll take care of you. He is simply the greatest, most staggering entertainer that mankind has ever produced. It may interest science fiction buffs to contemplate what sort of scripts Shakespeare might have written for Space: 1999, because although it isn’t often realised, he did write science fiction. What is The Tempest? It’s about a mystical island with a magical proprietor and the even more extraordinary, basic and savage slave. What about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the impossible happens every five minutes? Science fiction has existed almost as long as the human race. What is science fiction, after all? It is something constructed to carry your imagination beyond the realms of what you know to be currently possible. Take the law of gravity, for example. Suppose I drop a piece of paper and suddenly I am in a world where, instead of it falling down and hitting the floor, it goes upwards and flies around the room. There have been wonderful, wonderful writers of science fiction long before our brave lads on Space: 1999. Many of the earliest mystery plays – as they were called – in Christianity, which examined human frailties and human emotions, were in essence science fiction plays. Shakespeare, as I indicated, wrote some of the best science fiction plays ever. Then we come to people like Lewis Carroll – a good example in my view of a wonderful science fiction writer – who takes us to Wonderland, where the Duchess in one sequence of dialogue announces that she sets herself to believe three impossible things before breakfast every day. Well, that’s science fiction for you, isn’t it?
‘Another example is the plays written in the last century about reversals of time. British writer J B Priestley wrote a whole succession of stage plays in which he examined what the nature of time was and [presented] the theory that [history], instead of being a [linear] thread, is all going on at the same time; that the past, the present and the future could all be taking place at once. We recognise this with the phrase déjà vu – how many of us have had first-hand experiences where we suddenly stumble onto an [event] that somehow seems to chime with something that happened perhaps before we were born? And that’s why I think the realm, the whole genre, of science fiction is so challenging and, if it’s halfway decently done, so
rewarding.’
CRUCIAL ELEMENTS
Johnny Byrne explained: ‘The writers, like the Alphans themselves, were voyaging into the unknown. This was reflected in the progression of the first series. The further the Alphans receded from Earth, with all its apparent certainties, the more uncertain and challenging their lot became. They were confronting problems – moral, ethical, human, scientific – they didn’t really understand. Or, if they did, their understanding was never more than superficial. This was a crucial element in the first series – the sense that often there are no set and definite answers. To [find an answer] meant first understanding the question, and often the Alphans didn’t. Frequently they were dealing with matters the nature of which was beyond their Earthly limitations. Wisdom, when it did surface, was an acknowledgement of what they didn’t know, rather than what they did.’
Christopher Penfold recalled the epic qualities in his episodes, such as ‘The Last Sunset’: ‘I guess those epic qualities came from Aristotle and Socrates. I had a classical education and was pretty seriously impressed by the Greeks. It seemed to me that in dealing with what was not a very real circumstance – the idea of a group of human beings being cast adrift without any means of directing their future, beyond survival, in response to the circumstances that they encountered – that that in itself has a mythic quality about it. It really seemed to offer the opportunity of introducing into the context of what was always intended to be a popular drama series, those big questions that people sometimes are possibly a little bit frightened to ask themselves. That was really why a lot of the episodes I wrote had that decidedly mythic quality – it’s something I try to encourage. I do a lot of script editing now, and quite a lot of teaching, and it’s a quality that I try to encourage writers to find in almost all the work that they do. I think there is a mythic dimension even to a private eye series, or a detective story.’
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