It was also ITC, not the Andersons, who picked out the show’s two main stars – Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. ITC insisted on parachuting in an American writer, the experienced George Bellak, to work alongside the Anderson-picked staffers. It was to be a co-production between Group Three (the company set up by Gerry and Sylvia and long-time associate Reg Hill), ITC and Rome-based company RAI (whose involvement would mean some conspicuously placed Italian actors as guest stars). The Andersons had enjoyed almost complete creative freedom on their previous shows, but Space: 1999 would be an experience apart.
With that partnership came more directives and more meddling than he’d ever been used to. Stateside success was always the ambition, but this was the Andersons’ first time working for the New York office of ITC, the London-centric production company that had been his creative home since the early Sixties. “Okay, I’ll blow up the Moon then,” came the pragmatic response.
Mantel warned him that might scare viewers away. Gerry responded that he would “blow up the Earth” in the opening episode.
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Abe Mantel, ITC’s tough-talking man in New York, was keen, but told the husband-and-wife producers that he didn’t want a series featuring people “having tea in the Midlands”, and forbade any Earth-bound settings. Unwilling to waste the money and man-hours that had already gone into it, the Andersons put forward a fresh proposal, unconnected to UFO. ‘UFO: 1999’, as it was being dubbed, soon began pre-production, with designer Keith Wilson cooking up designs of the new central set.Īll seemed well, until the Andersons were called in. Couldn’t the Andersons retool the series and jettison the Earth locales? Intrigued by the challenge, Gerry got to work, flash-forwarding 20 years and shifting the action to an expanded SHADO moonbase. However, ITC’s New York office had noted that the stories set on SHADO’s moonbase rated noticeably better than the Earth-based episodes. With good ratings across the Atlantic, a second series was a given. The series appeared to finally give him the international smash he had always dreamed of (even Thunderbirds hadn’t caught fire in the US). His big flesh-and-blood break came in 1970 with UFO, about a secret(ish) military organisation, SHADO, set up to defend Earth from aliens. All of his shows from Supercar onwards would be made on 35mm film, and featured American voice artists to help make the product as desirable as possible to US buyers.īut Gerry had spent much of the Sixties wanting to get out of the puppet rut he found himself in. In the early days of ITV, when most shows were being made on scratchy, 405-line blur-o-vision videotape, was canny enough to know the commercial benefits of celluloid.
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It was a show that could have been one of the TV greats, had he kept his nerve and not tried to be, in his own words, “Mr Nice Guy”.Īlong with his wife and creative comrade, Sylvia, Gerry had always lusted after the American TV market. But this would be the first show he didn’t have total creative control over, with a whip-cracking New York office micro-managing the series from across the pond. With a record-breaking budget (£3.5 million for the first series) and two major-league stars, in many ways this was Gerry Anderson’s greatest dream realised. It seems strange, because Space: 1999was, at the time, the most expensive British TV series ever produced.
It was the puppet (or ‘Supermarionation’) shows – Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and the rest – that predictably dominated the column inches, with not much mention of his three live-action series: UFO, Space: 1999and Space Precinct. This was the catastrophe that, in 1975, kicked off Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Space: 1999, a series that barely got a mention in the obituaries of Gerry Anderson when he died on Boxing Day 2012. What didn’t happen was that the Moon was ripped from Earth’s orbit, hurtling the 311 men and women of Moonbase Alpha deep into space, unable to return home. Only one of the three really constitutes news (unless you’re a hardcore Oasis fan). On 13 September 1999, the following things took place: a terrorist bomb was set off in Moscow, Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit gave birth to a baby boy, and Benjamin Bloom, the American educational theorist, died.
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