FUTURE TENSE: British Science Fiction Television
Part Four / 1980–1990: ‘Window of vulnerability’ — From The Flipside of Dominick Hide to Star Cops
In the 1970s, fear of nuclear war had diminished in the face of greater global concerns about the environment, civil rights and the economy. However, by 1977 there were growing anxieties about nuclear weapons proliferation, the development of the neutron bomb and the Soviet Union’s refusal to ratify the Salt II arms control treaty. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration warned the US and NATO of ‘a window of vulnerability’ as the Soviet Union overtook them in the arms race.
Western military spending escalated and Thatcher’s government sanctioned the deployment of Cruise missiles from US bases in the UK. Nuclear paranoia descended on Europe and America after the power plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the early 1980s saw a tide of opposition to all forms of nuclear risk, including environmental contamination and war.
An ailing British economy was treated with a combined dose of monetarism, free enterprise, privatisation and a rolling back of the state. A divided Britain emerged, marked on one hand by unparalleled consumption and borrowing and on the other with desperate hardship as unemployment hit three million and unions battled with the government. Excess in visual culture, everything from architecture, fashion and music, went hand in hand with the arrival of MTV and an increasing sophistication in visual effects and production design on screens small and large. Television consumption changed with the advent of the domestic video recorder.
The themes that dominated British science fiction television of the 1970s: post-apocalyptic dystopias, ancient legends and myths, the supernatural and occultism continued to appear. Science fiction comedy as a specific strand emerged; the post-apocalyptic return to feudalism was given a new twist; and Cold War iconography and fear of nuclear war became the focus of several serials, single plays and children’s drama. New adaptations of classic books also suggested a return to heritage and tradition, as well as retrenchment in the face of imported US product.
“however beguiling nostalgia is… you’ve got to live in your own time.”
Some early attempts at television science fiction comedy in Britain had included Thames’s Ian Hendry vehicle The Adventures of Don Quick in 1970 and 1977’s innuendo driven David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd sit-com Come Back Mrs Noah. Although Doctor Who toyed with postmodern satire during the late 1970s, science fiction comedy truly established itself as a viable television format in the 1980s.
Within the Play for Today strand, Alan Gibson and Jeremy Paul’s bittersweet time travel romance The Flipside of Dominick Hide was a witty interpretation of early ’80s society from the perspective of the play’s eponymous innocent 22nd Century researcher. Arriving from 2130’s antiseptic, rather passionless future society in his flying saucer Dominick was plunged into our own chaotic one, chock full of anxieties and social hang-ups. The resulting cultural differentiation provided the humour. Woven into this was a classic time travel paradox, wherein Dominick’s search for his similarly named ancestor and a romance with clothes shop owner Jane Winters leads him to discover he is his own great-great-great grandfather.
The play was a considerable success with viewers and the BBC quickly commissioned a sequel, Another Flip For Dominick, which saw Dominick returning to 1982 to rescue a fellow time traveller and reconcile his relationships with Jane and wife Ava. As Jeremy Paul told the Radio Times, Dominick learns that “however beguiling nostalgia is… you’ve got to live in your own time.”
Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy used the well-worn tropes of science fiction to effectively deconstruct our own society’s absurdities and ponder ‘the meaning of life.’ Popularising philosophical and scientific ideas, it merged together the satire and wit of Python, Wodehouse and Swift. Broadcast on Radio 4 in March 1978, it became a bestselling LP and book before its adaptation into a television series in 1980.
The six-part television adaptation, first shown January 1981, was one of the most expensive BBC productions mounted at the time, with the pilot episode costing four times as much as one episode of Doctor Who and with the rest of the series consuming the entire annual light entertainment special effects budget.
However, it established many of the visual motifs that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy became heir to in its many incarnations, from computer game to feature film, and in its use of SF and comedy to subvert narrative conventions it provided a inspiration, despite the misfires of Nigel Kneale’s short-lived Kinvig (1981) and the slightly more robust Astronauts (1981–3) written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie and script-edited by Ian La Frenais and Dick Clements, for Red Dwarf’s mix of sit-com and science fiction in 1988.
Red Dwarf more or less flew the flag for science fiction on British television in the late 1980s after the cancellation of Doctor Who, when neither the BBC nor ITV could match the budgets of major US series, particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation which set the benchmark for such productions in 1987. Like Hitchhiker’s Guide, Red Dwarf originated on Radio 4, developed from Son of Cliché’s ‘Dave Hollins: Space Cadet’ sketches by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. A pilot for television was written in 1983 but the series itself did not go into production until 1986 and was first broadcast in 1988.
Using the classic sit-com set-up of disparate people trapped together in one space, Red Dwarf explored the class-ridden, patriarchal hierarchies of the characters marooned on a deep space mining ship. The exploits of the Red Dwarf’s crew also underlined how it was still a male dominated genre, with the male characters Lister and Rimmer continually reasserting masculine stereotypes and norms only to be undercut by their own sexual insecurities and gender narcissism. In this respect Red Dwarf could be seen as a response to feminist discourses of the 1980s, one that prefigured the ‘laddism’ of the 1990s.
The BBC series, running between 1988 and 1999, embraced popular science fiction themes, particularly the emergence of the cyberpunk sub-genre, with episodes that featured virtual reality, artificial intelligence, genetically engineered organisms and parallel universes, and reflected the sub-genre’s alienation, anti-capitalist trash aesthetic, and the merging of the body with technology.
Production values and budgets increased over the duration of the series’ run, and it was lauded for its meticulous, competent visual effects. It also demonstrated the differences between multi-camera sit-com recording before a live audience and single-camera ‘filmised’ (processing the video recordings to resemble film) comedy drama. It briefly experimented with the latter for its seventh series in 1997 before returning to multi-camera recording with an audience for the eighth series.
The BBC chose not renew Red Dwarf even though a ninth series was proposed in 1998. However, ten years later digital channel Dave revived the series with the three-part Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, as a single camera production made in high-definition, and it has since spawned three further series between 2011 and 2017.
… a thrillingly strange and baffling journey into inner, mythological space
Stylistically and thematically, Red Dwarf perhaps owes a debt to Channel 4’s 1985 cyberpunk satire Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future and its journalist Edison Carter whose investigation into a corrupt TV network’s use of dangerous ‘blipverts’ leads to an accident and his presumed death. The TV network covers up his death by creating a virtual clone, christened ‘Max Headroom’. The clone is an eccentric program, prone to glitches, but its rapid fire delivery ensures ratings success for the network. The TV film spawned a Channel 4 series The Max Headroom Show where Matt Frewer portrayed the the clone as a veejay host, introducing pop videos and interviewing celebrities. A drama spin-off of the original film also appeared in 1987, its pilot episode a remake of Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future and used to usher in two seasons featuring the further exploits of Edison Carter.
There were some highly personal, radical excursions into science fiction territory in 1981. David Rudkin’s three-hour conceptual epic Artemis 81 expanded an occult author’s investigation of unusual deaths on a North Sea ferry into a cosmic battle, between dueling angels of love and death, intended to seal humankind’s fate. With Hitchcock, organ music and Milton references aplenty, Artemis 81 was a thrillingly strange and baffling journey into inner, mythological space.
Shown in the Play for Today strand in 1981, David Leland’s Psy-Warriors was, by dint of Alan Clarke’s impressive direction, a rare instance of the experimental potential in the use of television studio techniques. The play unfolds as a disturbing and disorientating exploration of psychological warfare training, with the viewer first assuming the three suspects taken to a military installation are terrorists being tortured by British soldiers.
Clarke and Leland twist the narrative and reveal it is a voluntary exercise to ascertain how British soldiers can withstand and then use forms of brainwashing and torture. Highly prescient for its time, its imagery can now be aligned to present day reportage of human rights abuses across the globe.
Psy-Warriors could be considered as another borderline example of telefantasy to match several other of Clarke’s dramas. He had already explored the quasi supernatural, mythological aspects of the British landscape in David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen (1974) and there was more to come in the dystopian exploration of unemployment in Stars of the Roller State Disco (1984). A Play for Today shot, restlessly in motion, on a huge circular set, it viscerally depicted the dreadful cycle of unemployment using the allusion of the titular roller disco. It depicted teenagers spiraling into low paid work as it became available to them or condemned to a dull routine of mechanically produced food, casual drugs and sex and, eventually, violent correction.
The success of The Flipside of Dominick Hide also prompted BBC1 to commission a series of six plays as a spin-off to Play for Today, called Play for Tomorrow and shown in 1982. Near future settings were a backdrop to a challenging exploration of contemporary themes ranging from the criminal justice system, ‘the nuclear family’, the surveillance society, virtual reality and Northern Ireland.
The apocalyptic themes and radical politics that dominated the dramas of the 1970s took on a new urgency in the 1980s. Thatcher’s government was deeply unpopular and her determination to usurp cherished post-war consensus values and refashion Britain as an imperialistic, repressive state fed into the pessimism, paranoia and distrust at the heart of many science fiction television dramas.
Reflecting on the Callaghan government’s ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1979, Southern TV’s children’s drama Noah’s Castle, provided some provocative food for thought as it traced one family’s moral disintegration in a future society saddled with mass unemployment, inflation and industrial disputes. Some of these themes, particularly British nationalism, would later re-emerge in Knights of God, another children’s series made in 1987 by TVS, set in the Britain of 2020 after a major civil war and the deposition of the Royal Family. The country is divided and the South is ruled by a totalitarian religious order but a resistance movement sets out to re-establish the long lost heir to the throne and with him the return to democratic rule. A blend of Arthurian legend and Orwellian dystopia, the series was made in 1985 but transmission was delayed for two years as it was felt to be too pessimistic for family viewing.
Children’s drama in the 1980s became less didactic about contemporary fears. Fantasy dominated and in 1981 HTV produced a final addition to its impressive roster of children’s telefantasy with Into The Labyrinth, a low budget quest series that briefly took its teenage characters to various moments in history but also confined them to the same studio sets for a run of 21 episodes. Gerry Anderson returned to his puppet origins with Terrahawks in 1983, a knowing, very tongue-in-cheek reworking of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet.
A superb BBC adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1950s urtext of science fiction catastrophe, The Day of the Triffids, took the world we knew and plunged it into a savage future where the majority of the population is blind, the cities offer starvation and death and the sighted survivors face deadly walking plants. It evoked all the primal terrors of the Cold War, impending environmental calamity and the dissolution of social collectivism. Unlike the 1962 film, the BBC adaptation of 1981 retained the bleakness of the original novel and Mark Bould saw the series as a development of “1960s radical drama” that inherited a critique of the Thatcher administration’s policies and “its ‘dread of difference’ culture”.
Wyndham’s 1968 novel Chocky was also adapted in 1984 as a striking children’s drama for Thames Television. A touching and intriguing tale quite unlike much of Wyndham’s other work, Chocky concerns a young boy who appears to be in communication with some other form of intelligence. His parents and others wonder whether this is a particularly developed invisible friend, a case of possession, or something else entirely. Unlike most of his earlier work, the book concentrates on one family and thus explores psychological reactions to the strange events in place of the usual sociological speculation.
In another move uncharacteristic of Wyndham, everything is explained at the close of the novel, and the truth of the situation is reminiscent of Olaf Stapledon’s Starmaker and its theme of human evolution. This is in many ways a more positive view of alien intelligence than that offered in his novels of the 1950s, although it does contain similar musings on mankind’s unwillingness to change. Unlike the book, the alien Chocky is visualised through video effects in Anthony Read’s adaptation for Thames, that effectively transfered it to a then contemporary milieu of Rubik’s cubes and Atari consoles. Two original sequels Chocky’s Children (1985) and Chocky’s Challenge (1986) followed.
… the manipulation of heritage and the historical past
With Doctor Who transferred to a weekday slot in 1984, its traditional Saturday evening home was occupied by a 13-part adaptation of the first of John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ trilogy, The White Mountains. Produced by Richard Bates, The Tripods was both a potential replacement for Doctor Who and another iteration in the BBC’s co-productions of classic fantasy literature during the 1980s, including a very faithful version of Wells’ The Invisible Man (1984) and a spectacular, evergreen production of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights (1984).
The Tripods articulated a return to nostalgia and ‘Englishness’, a quality evoked in many film and television productions of the period that exported a certain national identity, via the manipulation of heritage and the historical past, as a component of the Thatcher era’s endorsement of traditional values. Although set in a post-apocalyptic 2089, the series begins among the rolling hills of England and in a feudal society dominated by alien invaders who patrol in their Tripod machines. They subjugate the young and any potential fight for independence by attaching a ‘cap’ to their skulls.
The central hero, Will Parker, rejects the status quo and sets off to join the resistance in France to restore equality and freedom to humankind. Yet, this was not exactly what audiences were expecting as the exploration of this feudalism — complete with expensive location shoots that romanticised the English landscape — never fully chimed with the audience.
The second series, based on the second of Christopher’s trilogy The City of Gold and Lead and made in 1985, evolved out of a pastoral vision of French vineyards and chateaus and saw Will enter the Tripod city on an undercover resistance mission. The tone of the The Tripods changed and the series became a tense, intriguing drama about Will’s mission where the dazzling visual effects for the interior of the domed city and its alien occupants thus relocated The Tripods within the science fiction spectacle of audience friendly, post-Star Wars productions.
Like the social preoccupations of Lang’s vision of the future in Metropolis (1927), the series explored further the themes of repression, identity, loyalty and class and John Christopher’s own projections of insularity and alienation. However, the return to spectacle was too late for a disinterested audience still craving big budget, imported U.S. space operas and a proposed third series was cancelled despite pre-production having started in January 1986 on a further 13-part series. The BBC could not justify the budget required.
The Cold War had never really thawed and fears of Soviet action against the West escalated to an unprecedented level in the mid-1980s. Nuclear anxieties had dominated science fiction drama for a substantial time and gathered impetus in Philip Martin’s 1980 Playhouse entry The Unborn, in which a nuclear scientist is convinced his son with become a dictator who will destroy the world in a nuclear war; horror serial The Nightmare Man (1981), in which the cyborg pilot of a secret Russian bio-weapon terrorises a remote Scottish island; and in Troy Kennedy Martin’s adaptation of Angus Wilson’s satirical novel The Old Men At The Zoo (1983).
Play For Today’s 1984 adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s posthumous novel Z For Zachariah was one of the first dramas to articulate the mood in Britain as it depicted the relationship between a young girl, living in a remote Welsh valley as the survivor of a nuclear devastation, and a male scientist suffering from radiation poisoning. As the scientist recovered, the patriarchal demand for power and domination at the root of such wars resurfaced in his attempt to take over her farm.
Far more provocative and disturbing was Mick Jackson’s drama-documentary of Barry Hines’s Threads, also transmitted in 1984. The detonation of a nuclear bomb over Sheffield and the ensuing nuclear winter was a powerful rebuttal of the view that such a war was winnable. Threads followed two families and a young couple, Jimmy and pregnant Ruth, as the threat of war escalates and becomes a horrifying reality.
Full of unforgettable, uncompromising images, Threads, as its title implied, showed how tenuous and fragile the bonds were between established generations and communities, those living and yet unborn, and how civilised society and government could literally be atomised. Grim statistics played out over the rapid decline into a new Dark Ages where Ruth’s daughter survives her into a world with little electricity, squalid hospitals and mass starvation.
Threads’ broadcast in 1984 was in sharp relief to the fate of Peter Watkins’ equally traumatising, disturbing anti-nuclear film The War Game, banned from BBC transmission in The Wednesday Play slot in 1965 when the Wilson government applied certain pressures on the broadcaster not to show it. On the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Watkins’ film received its first national TV broadcast in 1985 during a week of programming that included a repeat screening of Threads. It’s also worth noting that ABC’s television movie depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack, The Day After, had also caused a furore in America after its broadcast on 20 November 1983 and it was shown on ITV, in an edited form, three weeks later and accompanied by a promotional drive for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (1985) was perhaps the cultural apogee of the era’s nuclear paranoia and featured a Yorkshire police inspector who, while investigating the death of his environmental activist daughter Emma, uncovers a nuclear industry conspiracy that threatens the viability of the planet. Its flashback structure combined an evolution of the single play and serial and prefigured today’s ‘television as novel’ format.
It was a direct response to Thatcherism, to Reagan’s ‘Star Wars speech’, which proposed the development of a missile shield to ensure a winnable nuclear conflict, and, most remarkably, used magical realism to deliver a meditation on grief, the afterlife and our psychic bond with a self-regulating, living Earth.
Long running science fiction series were becoming quite thin on the ground by the end of the decade. Chris Boucher’s Star Cops (1987) was a mix of high frontier space future and detective fictions, its vision of 2027 returning to the realism embraced by Moonbase 3 (1973) and its setting of a European lunar base. In Star Cops the nations of the world have staked their claim on space with installations in orbit, on the moon and Mars. Humanity may have embraced the future with optimism, it seemed to say, but it has dragged all of its petty greed, corporate corruption and xenophobia with it. Boucher’s witty, spiky scripts definitely had promise, and it had good production values and visual effects, but the BBC’s ineffective scheduling and promotion betrayed their lacklustre support and it only lasted as one series of nine episodes.
A further oddity turned up in 1988. Central Television produced The One Game, a surreal four-part drama set in Birmingham. Not only did John Brown’s script tap into the burgeoning games industry and the rise of home computing and PC gaming but it married the quest narrative to an Arthurian mythological sub-text, proposing that the battle between two executives of a gaming company was in fact the resumption of an age-old grudge between Arthur and Merlin.
By the end of the 1980s it was clear that Star Wars (1977), and the many films that followed in the decade after, had revitalised the science fiction genre at the box office but some of the side effects were actually regressive, changing attitudes towards the genre for the worse. In some quarters of television production, it was considered, condescendingly so by those with the purse strings, as entertainment aimed solely at children. By 1989, even the seemingly infallible Doctor Who succumbed and, deemed by the BBC as a failure fit only for potential independent production or cinema adaptation, it was quietly cancelled just as the series regained its vitality after a fallow period and a production hiatus that exposed the BBC’s embarrassment by, and indifference to, the series.
Next time: Part Five / 1990–2005: Terra Incognita — From Space Precinct to Doctor Who
