We all have guilty pleasures. For instance, I have a thing for the Spice Girls (and most women groups), the movie Xanadu -- that's a story for another time -- soft rock, and so on. Most of these will be a topic for discussion down the road, but tonight, let's talk about something else.
Our topic is a TV show known as UFO. It's a British sci-fi show that was filmed in 1969-70 and aired in Great Britain and across the world, including the U.S., from 1970-1973. Only 26 episodes were produced, and for me, it's a bit of a guilty pleasure.
The show was created and produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. This was their first live action show. Before they had produced such shows as The Thunderbirds which were puppet-type sci-fi shows. UFO was about a secret organization formed by world governments to stop an invasion of from an alien species. The series was set in 1980. It featured a moon base where attack ships were placed that could hunt down UFOs before hitting Earth. There was a submarine that patrolled the oceans and was able to shoot a space plane into the sky. Oh, and headquarters for the entire operation, known as SHADO, was located under a British film studio in London.
The commander of SHADO was played by an American actor, Ed Bishop. He plays a former Air Force colonel who is put in charge of putting together SHADO and running the far-flung operation while, for his cover, he runs a movie studio -- there are scenes of him approving scripts, fighting with directors, dealing with casting decisions, and lots of scenes set on movie lots. One of his second-in-commands is played by Michael Billington, a man who was almost James Bond but lost out to George Lazenby. Another second-in-command is played by Wanda Ventham, who today is perhaps best known as the mother of Benedict Cumberbatch.
There's a lot about this show that just doesn't work now. There are the hair styles and the clothes: lots of big hair for women, lots of mini-skirts and skintight uniforms, lots of Nehru jackets for the men. The women on the moon base wore metallic mini-skirts and they all wore purple wigs. The guys smoke, which is kind of a strange thing in a pressurized environment. Oh, and the office of the man in command is stocked with a full, working bar.
The special effects are actually pretty good for a 1970 TV show. The models are obvious, especially with the futuristic looking airplanes. But the guy in charge of special effects was Derek Meddings. From UFO, Meddings would go on to do effects for Superman, Superman II, Superman III, Batman, and lots of James Bond movies, including Goldeneye, Moonraker, and The Spy Who Loved Me. So UFO was obviously a pretty good training ground for Meddings.
The show hit on some surprisingly adult themes, including adultery, murder, being a workaholic, the effects on family life for those who have to keep secrets. It foresaw mobile phones and wireless phones. Space junk consisting of dead satellites and abandoned parts of spaceships like Apollo 8 were posited as dangers to orbital flight traffic. It also predicted the aliens were a human-type species from a dying planet who attacked Earth to harvest the organs of healthy humans.
The series only lasted 26 episodes, about one season. It kept playing in different time slots throughout Great Britain and US and Canada. It didn't air on consistent nights. There was a huge break about midway through the series because the Andersons had to switch film studios after the one from which they had been shooting was shut down. But it captured enough attention that, several years later, the Andersons tried to do it all again, this time with a series set entirely on the moon.
There were no invading aliens. Instead, the moon was knocked out of Earth orbit and sitting flying through space after a massive explosion of nuclear waste on the dark side of the moon. That series would be known as Space: 1999. It lasted two seasons. It had two big TV stars in Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. But while more insane than UFO, it's just not as good of a show.
Yes, it all sounds entirely stupid. Yet I own the DVD box set and I cycle through all the episodes about once a year -- I just hit finished episode six of my current rewatch. But I love it all the same.
So that's my guilty pleasure. For tonight.
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