the times | Tuesday August 11 2020 1GT 9
arts
ITV/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKcharacter was not a spy who knew
too much, but a scientist who knew
how to build rockets.
This may well be the key to The
Prisoner. It is surely the key to most
of the programmes Britbox will
be showing. The moon-landing
decade unleashed sci-fi across the
schedules. When The Avengers
finished in May 1969 Steed and his
latest partner, Tara King, blasted
off atop a rocket, flirtatiously
drinking champagne.
By 1979, with Britain in strike-
ridden recession, the money was
not around to make productions
that looked as good as The
Prisoner and The Avengers. The
producers of Sapphire and Steel, a
serial taped (not filmed) entirely
in a studio in Elstree, spent what
they had on its stars. It was well
spent. Joanna Lumley from The New
Avengers and David McCallum,
ex-The Man from U.N.C.L.E, played a
pair of extraterrestrial invigilators
sent to remedy abnormalities caused
by the past bursting into the present
— a bit like what is about to happen
on Britbox.
It was the leading actors’ allure
that carried the series, although
many sci-fi lovers will tell you thatPeter J Hammond, who went on to
write Midsomer Murders, came up
with scripts that were spooky and
ingenious. Things ended in 1982 with
Sapphire and Steel abandoned in
a petrol station. Lumley, who
remembers the series with fondness,
told TV Years magazine last year she
was not happy: “We were never
rescued.” The series, always short of
studio space, had run out of time,
alongside Grade’s ATV, which had just
lost its Midlands ITV franchise.
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) is
the anomaly of this revival, not really
sci-fi and never in danger of taking
itself seriously. There were no
what’s-that-all-about ponderings, only
crimes to be solved by a down-at-heel
private detective whose greatest
investigatory asset was a ghost. Marty
Hopkirk, having been killed, returned
from beyond, but was visible only to
his partner Jeff Randall (not the
BBC’s former business editor).
As Hopkirk, the excellent Kenneth
Cope wore a stylish white suit that
predated John Travolta’s in Saturday
Night Fever. In contrast, I recall Mike
Pratt’s seedy Randall as a rather too
lugubrious presence in what was
essentially a series of capers. Vic
Reeves and Bob Mortimer had
another go at making it work in
2000, for the BBC. The original was
better, I do hope you’ll agree.
TS Eliot told us that time future
is contained in time past. The odd
thing is that most of the programmes
Britbox has got its hands on were
stories about the future made at a
time when Britain was petrified the
world was going to terminate in
nuclear catastrophe. I trust we shall
discover that, like the world, the
shows have, given everything,
endured remarkably well.episodes lost interest in alien invasion.
One concentrated on the Shado
commander’s failed marriage. Another
featured a hippy who thought she
might have simply been tripping on
LSD when she saw her boyfriend
abducted by aliens (ITV broadcast that
one well out of its teatime slot).
I suspect the reruns will reveal
plenty of insights into 1970. UFO is,
in any case, a ton better than the last
of the Anderson shows Britbox has
rediscovered, Space: 1999, broadcast
between 1975 and 1977. Its premise was
that a nuclear explosion had ripped
the moon from its orbit and sent it
and its moon base into outer
space, where aliens be. It was
chilly out there, so chilly that for
its second series Grade ordered
an old Star Trek executive to
warm things up. Plots became
absurd. OK, they became more
absurd. An alien turned up
claiming to be God, for
example. An episode contains
one of my favourite bad lines
in sci-fi (and I quote from
memory): “Life after death?
Maybe, maybe not. But a man
haunted by himself before he
dies? What is that all about?”
For philosophical depth try
The Prisoner. This weirdness
was what happened when the
above-referenced Grade gave
the star of his hit series Danger
Man his head. McGoohan was
the thinking ITV viewer’smley: it’s my TV heaven
about damnation. Scarlet was a dead
man resurrected by the Mysterons, but
who had somehow remained a friend
of our planet; his enemy was Captain
Black, equally dead, equally restored
to life, but whose soul had been
claimed by the extraterrestrials and
turned as black as his name.
For the first time in
Supermarionation history the heads
of the puppets were proportionate to
their bodies. They looked less like
puppets. We should have known what
was coming. After the disappointment
of his subsequent Joe 90 and The
Secret Service, Anderson jettisoned
the puppets, cast actors and made a
show for grown-ups. You can soon
judge for yourself 1970’s UFO, but the
conventional criticism, that Anderson
got even more wooden performances
out of humans than marionettes, has
some truth in it.
UFO is a grown-up Captain Scarlet.
Earth is again at risk from aliens. A
shadowy organisation called Shado is
set up to repel them. Its HQ is located
with some economy beneath an
English film studio (the one where
UFO was made). Whereas the
Anderson puppet series were generally
set 100 years hence, this was placed
in 1980, by which time women, male
viewers were delighted to discover,
wore to work silver miniskirts,
see-through blouses and metallic wigs.
The series was even odder than it
sounds. Despite a moon base to visit
and a fleet of Shadomobiles, someRoger Moore, a former classical actor
and one of the most eccentric and
difficult people I would interview. The
show had a version of McGoohan’s
Danger Man hero John Drake
imprisoned on a sunny but totalitarian
coastal village (actually Portmeirion
in Wales) whose blandly compliant
residents had numbers not names.
McGoohan was No 6 and, through
adventures that crossed genres —
one episode was a western — he
made it his business to find
out who was No 1, his
ultimate jailer.
Much has been written
about The Prisoner’s
significance, including by
me. The idea of an over-
watched society is clearly
current right now (my bet is
that the global village’s No 1
is Mark Zuckerberg) and in
2009 it was remade by
ITV as a dull mini-series.
The breakthrough in
Prisoner studies,
however, was made by
the film-maker Alex
Cox three years ago
in a clever little book
called I Am (Not)
a Number: Decoding The
Prisoner. Through careful
rewatching and the exclusion
of an episode McGoohan
played no part in, Cox
discovered, at least to his own
satisfaction, that McGoohan’sThe Out of this
World collection is
available on Britbox
from August 20c t h P o b d s f
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o d r n t P p sin
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sps en
A e p s b — o t ms
The Prisoner
Space: 1999
Sapphire and Steel
McGoohan was
the thinking
ITV viewer’s
Roger Moore