FUTURE TENSE: British Science Fiction Television - Part One / 1938–1969: ‘Bring Something Back’ - From R.U.R to The Prisoner
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| R.U.R ©BBC 1938 |
These are the longer, uncut versions of the original posts with minor additions and corrections.
The earliest examples of British science fiction television, two adaptations of Karel Čapek’s 1920 stage play R.U.R (aka Rossum’s Universal Robots),
from which the word ‘robot’ entered the language, bookended the span of
the Second World War. Jan Bussell’s thirty-five minute version was
produced for BBC’s fledgling television service in 1938. Experimental in
nature, the Radio Times advertised it as “a play that should lend
itself very well indeed to television from the point of view of
effects.” It was remade ten years later, again by Bussell, and featured
future Doctor Who Patrick Troughton as one of the robots leading a revolution against their human creators.
R.U.R
touched on major themes about dehumanisation through technology and the
failures of a technologically driven utopia. It seemed entirely apt to
revisit such themes in 1948 as British society emerged from the
privations of the Second World War, rejected the imposed austerity of
the 1950s and set about considering the future.
The play traversed the technocratic idealism and scientific romance of H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, and its extension into dystopian, totalitarianism in George Orwell’s novel of 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Both were part of a British science fiction literary tradition that
included Arthur Conan Doyle, E.M Forster, Rudyard Kipling, John Wyndham,
Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, C.S. Lewis, John Christopher and Arthur
C. Clarke.
They
epitomised the then key elements of the British science fiction
tradition, one quite different to the pulp American form of the 1930s
and 1940s. British insularity, isolation, anxiety and apocalypse were
state of the nation tropes and they would be manifested in literature,
theatre, cinema and, most effectively, on television.
Both versions of R.U.R were
also televisual experiments that expanded upon the innovations of radio
and theatre. Their creative use of limited resources established another
tradition of British science fiction television where the visually and
audibly strange were presented in the ordinary, intimate, domestic
environment of the viewer.
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| The Time Machine ©BBC 1949 |
Writer
Nigel Kneale, a key figure in the development of science fiction on
British television, captured a sense of Britain’s changing fortunes in
the 1950s as it was increasingly dominated by science and technology and
its culture became heavily influenced by American consumerism. Kneale cut his teeth adapting 1952’s psychic alien possession drama Mystery Story and nuclear thriller Number Three
in 1953 after joining the new Script Unit at the BBC in 1951. Both
plays critiqued the pursuit of scientific knowledge and coincided with
the optimism of the Festival of Britain, the debut of the Comet jet
aircraft and the imminent completion of Britain’s first nuclear power
station.
‘A countless host… with one single consciousness’
Viennese cinema director Rudolph Cartier arrived at the BBC in 1950 and worked with Kneale adapting Arrow to the Heart
in 1952. The urgent need to fill a Saturday night slot in the BBC
schedule gave them an opportunity to push the technical and stylistic
potential of television with their ‘thriller in six parts’, 1953’s The Quatermass Experiment.
Cartier
eschewed the intimacy of previous BBC dramas and brought his cinematic
vision to bear upon Kneale’s human story of an astronaut who returns to
Earth possessed by an alien entity. The exploits of the
anti-establishment scientist with a conscience, Bernard Quatermass,
gripped an audience of five million viewers and a British science
fiction legend was born.
Cartier and Kneale next confidently tackled an adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
and its broadcast in 1954 caused complaints and questions in
Parliament. Cartier again sought a broader scale, using over twenty sets
and pre-filmed inserts, to adapt Orwell’s austere, totalitarian science
fiction polemic.
It tapped into the still raw emotions about the darkest days of the
Second World War and the fresh anxieties about the Cold War. The play’s
final scenes, the torture of hero Winston Smith played by Peter Cushing,
in Room 101 proved to be too graphic for BBC viewers. Yet, despite the
protests about its 12th December debut the BBC repeated the play on the
16th December.
Simultaneously, when the makers of Nineteen Eighty-Four
were described as ‘sadists and readers of Horror comics’, this
reflected concerns about a creeping Americanisation of British culture
through its SF and horror magazines and comic books. Hollywood’s own mix
of paranoia and spectacle in the era’s science fiction film boom saw
the genre gradually becoming a mass medium entertainment.
The
arrival of the BBC’s commercial rival ITV in 1955 merely added fuel to
the debate about high and low culture. Kneale and Cartier returned in
the same year with Quatermass II,
a deeply paranoid, pessimistic alien possession thriller that, as James
Chapman noted, said a great deal more about ‘national impotence’ as
Britain struggled to come to terms with its fading global influence. Quatermass and the Pit
in 1958 upped the ante with a claustrophobic tale about humanity’s
violent ancestral Martian legacy, fashioning an SF allegory from
Britain’s colonial past and the race riots of that summer.
With his characteristic conservative pessimism, Kneale produced further plays in the genre in the decade that followed. The Creature, another starring vehicle for Peter Cushing and made prior to Quatermass II,
was about an expedition to find the legendary Yeti. After a period
working on film scripts, Kneale provided a ghost story with a twist
about 18th century villagers haunted by a future nuclear apocalypse in
1963’s The Road. Sadly, the
play does not survive in the archive. He also worked with director
Michael Elliott in 1964 on ATV’s nuclear thriller The Crunch.
Another Kneale-Elliott collaboration The Year of the Sex Olympics
in 1968, a psychedelic expression of what Adam Curtis noted as ‘the
paranoia that was beginning to seep into the left at the end of the
1960s’, was a chillingly prescient satire about the influence of mass
media and reality television that continues to resonate today.
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| The Quatermass Experiment ©BBC 1953 |
By the start
of the 1960s the BBC’s commercial rivals ITV had captured the ratings
with mass market, popular programmes, not only filling their schedules
with slickly made imports but also with indigenous plays, series and
serials. Associated Rediffusion and ABC produced many SF themed dramas
in this period, primarily obsessing about misguided scientists and their
failed attempts to launch rockets, encroaching apocalypse and its
consequences.
David Karp’s One (1956), Priestley’s Doomsday for Dyson (1958), Lester Fuller’s Before the Sun Goes Down (1959), Murder Club — an adaptation of Robert Sheckley’s The Tenth Victim — and Giles Cooper’s Loop (1963), about an invasion via outside TV broadcasts, and his adaptation of John Lymington’s The Night of the Big Heat (1961) were just a few of the plays from this period.
One
of the key figures responsible for the radical reshaping of drama at
ITV franchise ABC was Canadian drama producer Sydney Newman. With the Armchair Theatre
drama anthology he produced a series of plays that drew audiences of up
to 12 million viewers and brought realism and new writers to the fore.
He also supervised children’s drama and in 1960 commissioned Malcolm Hulke and Eric Paice’s six part Sunday afternoon serial Target Luna,
about Buchan Island’s experimental rocket group headed by Norman
Wedgewood, his children Geoff, Jimmy and Valerie, journalist Conway
Henderson and a hamster called Hamlet.
It was so successful it spawned three equally popular sequels, Pathfinders in Space, Pathfinders to Mars and Pathfinders to Venus.
The various exploits of Wedgewood, the children and Henderson took them
to Mars and Venus in fast paced, positivist adventure serials that
blended science fact with the wonders and terrors of space exploration.
While the production values were primitive, the Pathfinders trilogy set an ambitious template for popular children’s science fiction television in the 1960s.
Newman also reinvigorated ABC’s Saturday night schedule when he developed The Avengers,
a Cold War espionage thriller that gradually transformed into a quirky
escapist fantasy, its reassuring traditionalism and sophisticated
modernity becoming the epitome of 1960s meritocratic pop. Many episodes
of The Avengers, particularly
when it moved from a studio VT to all film production, embraced science
fiction concepts as suave British spy John Steed set out to foil
diabolical masterminds of all inclinations.
‘Twenty robots… whirling through the universe with a sense of evil.’
1962’s Dumb Martian,
an adaptation of John Wyndham’s short story and allegory about racism
and domestic abuse that featured a space pioneer purchasing a mute
Martian wife for company, was shown in the Armchair Theatre strand. Its story editor Irene Shubik had joined ABC in 1960, commissioning a number of fantasy themed scripts for Armchair Theatre and used the adaptation to launch her science fiction anthology series Out of this World. The only surviving episode, her adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Little Lost Robot, exploring the ethics of creating a race of artificial intelligences, received a welcome DVD release by the BFI in 2014.
She established contact with agent John Carnell, who had founded science fiction magazine New Worlds
and had many SF writers on his books, and together they selected the
short stories for adaptation. Its range of literate, thought-provoking
adaptations demonstrated that American and British science fiction were
contemporary bedfellows, with stories by Asimov, Clifford Simak and
Philip K Dick rubbing shoulders with new scripts from Terry Nation and
Richard Waring. These were connections Shubik would exploit when she and
Newman moved to the BBC.
The BBC had, meanwhile, scored another success with the seven part serial A For Andromeda
in 1961. Noted astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle and producer John
Elliot created an eerie story about a group of scientists who receive
extra terrestrial instructions to design and build an advanced computer
and create a life form, Andromeda. Once again, it was a drama focused on
Cold War suspicions and paranoia, fears of technological advancement as
well as the moral and ethical conflicts between idealistic science and
government bureaucracy. Its sequel The Andromeda Breakthrough in 1962 developed the themes further into a critique of the degradation of science under capitalism.
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| Doctor Who ©BBC 1963 |
When Sydney Newman moved to the BBC in December 1962, he set about
reorganising the Drama department. Prior to this Alice Frick, Donald
Bull and John Braybon of the BBC Survey Group had compiled internal
reports about science fiction, drama and audiences, referencing A for Andromeda and Out of this World.
The reports would stimulate Newman’s desire to create a new series for
Saturday tea time. He recruited his former ABC production assistant
Verity Lambert to produce what would become the longest running science
fiction series in the world, Doctor Who.
In November 1963 a British cultural phenomenon made its debut and Doctor Who then cemented its success when Lambert convinced Newman that Terry Nation’s seven-part story The Daleks (aka The Mutants)
did not violate his rule against ‘bug-eyed monsters’ or his remit for
the series to be scientifically and historically educational. The
series’ longevity was assured when the Daleks made their first
appearance in December 1963. Since then, its format has embraced hard
science fiction, historic adventure, fantasy, Gothic horror and satire.
Its appeal to generations old and new continues unabated by dint of the
production team’s remarkable decision in 1966 to 'regenerate' its leading
man.
Nation’s renewed affinity for science fiction also inspired Irene
Shubik, who also moved with Newman to the BBC, and she asked him to
adapt Isaac Asimov’s novel The Caves of Steel for drama anthology Story Parade
in 1964. Starring Peter Cushing as detective Elijah Bailey, the play
concerned itself with his investigation of the murder of an eminent
scientist and the developing relationship with his partner on the case,
the robot R. Daneel Olivaw. A detective mystery, it also provided Shubik
with a social commentary on xenophobia, over-population and the impact
of technology on human behavior.
During production of Story Parade,
Shubik proposed a science fiction anthology to Newman and commissioned
the first 13 scripts for what became the landmark BBC2 series, Out of the Unknown.
Shubik produced a daring, provocative and ambitious showcase of British
and American writers, resolutely using science fiction as a vehicle to
examine contemporary anxieties and concerns through allegory, metaphor
and satire.
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| Out of the Unknown ©BBC 1966 |
Stories
by Pohl, Ballard, Asimov, Simak, Brunner were adapted by the cream of
British scriptwriters and, later, new scripts were commissioned from
Nigel Kneale, Brian Hayles and Michael J Bird. As Mark Ward eloquently
notes within the BFI DVD release of the 20 surviving episodes, its space
age, swinging sixties currency may be passé but the series’
examinations of ‘the individual, the state, human identity, law and
order, education, consumerism, medicine, war and so on, still concern
us.’
While Out of the Unknown engaged intellectually with the genre, ABC’s Undermind in 1965 offered more of the same with its post-Quatermass
alien conspiracy theme about an anarchic alien fifth column threatening
Britain’s security. The BBC attempted to emulate the stylish heroics of
The Avengers and ITC’s action adventure series with displaced Edwardian crime fighter Adam Adamant Lives! and Bondian alien secret agents led by Simon King, thwarting alien invasions in Counterstrike.
ITV’s schedules were also dominated by American imports from the Irwin Allen stable including Lost in Space, Land of the Giants and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Homegrown series for ITV were primarily the responsibility of Gerry and
Sylvia Anderson who scored enormous success with their filmed
Supermarionation puppet series.
Supercar, Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons,
made for ITC during the 1960s, captured the essence of the space age
and the post-war utopian ideal man working in harmony with technology.
Crucially the blend of action and adventure with innovative visual
effects, transnational settings and instantly recognisable signature
music secured lucrative international sales and broadcast.
Similarly ITC film series such as The Champions and Department S featured many episodes with a science fiction flavor but their jewel in the crown was surely The Prisoner.
Like Kneale, its star Patrick McGoohan anticipated the ‘fall out’ from
the swinging Sixties and the consequences of the culture wars between
the establishment and the counterculture. His strange, surreal series
about a secret agent who resigns and is interned in a bizarre Italianate
detention centre to have his mind scoured for valuable information, was
full of moral and ethical questions about freedom and conformity.
The Prisoner
expressed something of the postmodern qualities of British science
fiction literature as it underwent a radical transformation under
Michael Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds magazine. It had become a medium of ideas and styles and the sounding board for great social and cultural changes.
Television
and film iterations also attempted to reflect the counterculture
movement’s determination to put issues about environmentalism, poverty,
racial and sexual equality on the mainstream agenda. By the 1970s,
science fiction offered an opportunity for producers, writers and
directors to comment on the unfulfilled utopian promises of the 1960s
and explore many alternate coming of age realities.
Next time: Part Two / 1970–75: ‘Waiting for the collapse’ — From Doomwatch to The Changes
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