Tag: BFI

Time in Advance

Two men toasting drinks

by William Tenn
Adapted by Peter Erickson

Some stories can only be told in the science fiction genre. Then there are stories like this one, which could be just as easily be told as a western or a crime thriller. Not only would it only take some simple rewriting to turn this episode into a film noir, it might have been preferable.

In the far future, there is excitement amongst Earth’s media when a prison ship returns from the outer frontier carrying Crandall and Henck, the first two men to have survived seven years and earned a licence to murder. They are pre-criminals, men who have confessed to their crimes ahead of committing them. They can earn the right to commit their crime by serving a sentence working on harsh alien planets preparing them for colonisation. Moving into a luxury hotel, the two comrades begin to plan their murders, only to discover that much can change in seven years and what they believed was the truth is often not.

There are several problems with this episode. For a start the whole pre-crime idea is a bit daft and it’s hard to understand how such an odd judicial system started up. There’s a debate between a judge and a journalist near the start but it is a bit of strawman affair. “Would you prefer to go back to a time when men were tortured and killed as punishment?” intones the Examiner, played by the gaunt Peter Madden. Are they the only options then? Medieval punishment or a penal suicide mission where its hoped the criminal will change his mind or die in the attempt? It later transpires that normal prisons also exist in this future, making the existence of pre-crime even more confusing.

Then there is Crandall, supposedly a man so determined, ruthless and angry with his ex-business partner that he is prepared to spend seven hellish years to get a chance to kill him. Yet Edward Judd plays him in such an avuncular, reasonable manner that it is hard to believe. Crandall is so sensible and considerate towards others throughout the episode, that surely he would have rationalised away his bitterness during his exile? He might carry a grudge, but to embark on such an extreme revenge? Maybe he was a different man seven years ago but we are given no evidence of that.

Mike Pratt makes a better job of the angry, slightly pathetic Henck, still wound up with resentment towards the woman who trapped him in a loveless cuckolded marriage. His journey is the sub-plot but it actually sounds the more interesting as he tells it in the hotel bar. His imagined perfect dramatic revenge is quickly thwarted by a series of mundane events that leave him feeling cheated and confused.

Padding is another bugbear of this episode, with several stretches of nothing much happening except Crandall living in the future, using various gadgets. I was amused to see that the hotel television seems to be showing out-takes from the Sixties Doctor Who ‘howlaround’ experiments. There is also a return of the show’s curious obsession with blonde wigs, undoubtedly the same ones used a few weeks ago in The Counterfeit Man. Whilst early model shots of the spacecraft landing must be viewed charitably, the shot of the futuristic city skyline combined with live footage taken in a park is excellent.

Where the episode works best is in its moments of black comedy. The camp but sadistic prison guard (Oliver MacGreevy) who hopes his ‘boys’ have a happy time back on Earth. The oily religious man (Ken Parry) who implores Crandall to forgive and forget, then suggests he profit from his licence by killing a businessman of his acquaintance. The fact that Crandall’s ex-wife Polly (Wendy Gifford) is convinced he wants to kill her and is slightly put out when she discovers he never has.

After a sense of lofty ambitions of the first part of the season, Time in Advance feels altogether more pulpish. Melodrama has always been a part of SF magazines output. It is not outrageously bad, it just feels a bit corny. Perhaps it should have been about two men who escape from prison after seven years, having been double-crossed and out for revenge? And half an hour long?

The Dead Past

Two scientists with futuristic machine

by Issac Asimov
Adapted by Jeremy Paul

Even without his name on the credits, I could have guessed this was an Asimov tale, since it has his common themes of extrapolating a scientific fantasy theory in a realistic fashion, and linking it with the idea of a group of experts manipulating society with sociological techniques for its greater good. It’s a model that can be found in novels like End of Eternity, Caves of Steel and the Foundation series. Furthermore the plot is essentially a series of debates between scientists and other experts, a form he uses in a lot of his stories. It is an odd bird of an episode, starting as criticism of science that is led by politicians and big business, moving into time travel of a kind, then ending up with a twist that this story’s apparent villains might have been in the right after all.

In the not too distant future, Arnold Potterley is obsessed with proving his theory that ancient Carthage was not the barbaric civilization that history has painted it. Unfortunately he cannot get any access to the famous Chronoscope, despite his impeccable credentials.The Chronoscope is a device which can project pictures and sound from the past. The government owns the only model and publishes a monthly report based on its discoveries. Potterley persuades a young physicist called Jonas Foster to ignore the strict rules which effectively control all scientific research in the future and investigate the abandoned field of chronoscophy, with the goal of building his own private machine in the basement of his house. However when he does, the two men make a series of unhappy and far-reaching discoveries.

There are some fascinating ideas in this episode that have not really dated at all. In fact the basic story would fit perfectly into an episode of Black Mirror. Potterley initially thinks of the machine as a way of studying ancient history, but his wife Caroline is only interested in revisiting her own history, those years containing their daughter who died at a tragically young age. But even Potterley can see the seductive dangers of reliving the past. “Watching those years, over and over until you go mad?” he tries to warn her. “Parents looking for their children. Children searching for their dead parents. Old men trying to relive their lost youth! Mankind would be living in the dead past!” But it is government minister Thaddeus Araman (a very Asimov name!) who points out the even greater danger of the scope. “What is history? History is one second ago.” This time machine has become the ultimate surveillance device, worse the ultimate voyeur tool, able to show anything from anyone’s life with no possible prevention. In today’s CCTV, social media and selfie obsessed world, the idea has even more resonance. In light of this, the government’s attempts to quash any possible research into the device seem very understandable. However the fact that they keep their machine working and clearly make lots of use of it, weakens their moral authority. Of course their intentions are ultimately doomed, scientific knowledge can always be rediscovered. There’s also a small sub-plot warning about the dangers of scientific research becoming too bureaucratic, individual scientists becoming too specialised and methodical in their knowledge so that they cannot make inspired connections.

Potterley is an interesting character. His pompousness and infatuation with Carthage is rather comical, but there is something slightly unnerving about him too with his clipped tones and buttoned down emotions. It is a fine performance from George Benson. His co-star James Maxell has the drier part as Foster, his dialogue filled with most of the scientific language and his character less defined. But he makes us believe in this conventional young man who imagination is fired and who finds an unexpected reckless streak within himself. Amongst all this discussion between intense academics are two outsider characters who bring some colour to the story. Willoughby Goddard is splendidly dyspeptic as Foster’s veteran journalist uncle and acts mostly as comic relief. Sylvia Coleridge gives a sympathetic portrait of repressed grief playing Caroline Potterley.

An enjoyable play of ideas rather than action. The Dead Past ends on a memorably downbeat image suggesting that Potterly and Araman’s worst fears are coming true. A sequel set in this world of potentially total surveillance by everyone would be challenging but exciting. Perhaps the closest we’ve come to it on television is my favourite Black Mirror episode The Entire History of You. I’m looking forward to the future Asimov adaptations in this anthology.

Stranger in the Family

Father and son with microscope

Written by David Campton

After two episodes set in the future, featuring mostly male professionals and very science fictional concerns, this third episode, based in a contemporary London of shabby flats and pubs, centered around the emotions  and complicated motivations of its protagonists, feels very different. Sharper somehow. Maybe its simply a case that the tension of wondering if a man is an alien in disguise is of a different tenor to that of watching a vulnerable woman being exploited by a man who can will her to obey him regardless.

Boy may seem like just another awkward, sensitive young man in London, but not only is he unusually intelligent, he is telepathic and can control others with his mind. For years he and his parents have prevented his powers being discovered and kept one step ahead of an organisation who want to study him. But years on the run are taking their toll. When Boy falls in love with a struggling actress and meets her conniving agent/boyfriend, matters reach a crisis.

For me the biggest strength of this story, the first to be written directly for the series rather than adapted from a book, is that all its characters are in shades of grey. At first we perceive the men who pursue the Wilsons as unquestionably sinister, but as the story unfolds and I learnt more about Evans and his institution of other mutant children, not to mention his philosophical acceptance that one day his generation may well be replaced by this new evolution, he becomes if not sympathetic, then a practical man with a reasoned argument. It helps that he speaks with the rich urbane tones of Jack May.

Similarly Boy himself is a contradictory mixture, despicable arrogance and selfishness, yet at the same time tragic and vulnerable, shaped into this dangerous innocent by his parents’ well-meaning protection. By being denied exposure to other people, one can assumed he was home schooled, he has no empathy. Like a child, he is squarely at the center of his world and can only see people in terms of what they offer or threaten him. Richard O’Callaghan cleverly uses a singsong cadence in Boy’s speech to emphasize his immaturity.

Charles and Margaret Wilson are also quite nuanced. Two intelligent people who have sacrificed a great deal to protect their son, but now stuck in a cycle of isolation and suspicion. Their love has inevitably become tempered by the understandable stress of looking after a son who is no longer a child. In one of the most memorable scenes, they discuss what to do next, where they can flee, how they can protect him from harm. Then from nowhere Charles says flatly, “I wish he was dead.” Margaret says nothing but her face shows her understanding.

Justine Lord, something of a television regular at the time playing various troubled blondes, is excellent as Paula, a woman whom experience has given a hard outer shell. Yet underneath is someone with a desire for a gentler life. Maybe to some extent she is a stereotype, an actress struggling through unrewarding small jobs, chasing a dream of stardom but all too aware that she is getting older and it’s moving ever faster away. Perhaps secretly believing that shysters like her boyfriend Sonny are as good as its going to get. Her scenes where she comes under Boy’s sexually driven mind control are genuinely uncomfortable, both during and after. With no special effects, the telepathy scenes succeed purely through her and the other actors reactions. A later scene where Boy forces Sonny to nearly drown himself in the bathroom is nearly as unsettling.

So just as good is the moment would-be assassin Brown is driven to murder himself, as he protests with awful calmness as he drives a blade into himself. Brown is played by John Paul, later star of Doomwatch and by odd coincidence his Doomwatch co-star Joby Blanshard turns up as a fellow agent. Actually Brown is a pretty rubbish undercover operative. In his first meeting with the Wilsons as their new neighbour, he is pretty transparent as he peers around their living room, asking about their son, and radiating insincere bonhomie.

This episode has a definite echo of Out of the Unknown‘s spiritual predecessor Armchair Theatre. Take away the telepathy angle and this could easily fit into that series next to A Night Out, another play about a sheltered young man with a pressure cooker home life, trying to spread his wings but sabotaging himself with unhappy consequences. The climax is effective but also curiously low-key. No mob with flaming torches, no pyrotechnics. Just a squalid killing and a few damaged lives.

 

 

The Counterfeit Man

David Hemming sits at a futuristic desk

I should warn you that there are going to be spoilers in this review.

The Counterfeit Man
by Alan Nourse
Adapted by Philip Broadley

Returning to Earth after a disappointing expedition to Ganymede, Dr Crawford, the ship’s medical officer, is shocked when a routine check-up reveals crewman Wescott cannot possibly be human. When a second test comes back normal, the doctor is convinced that they have an alien intruder which can copy humans down to a molecular level. With the reluctant help of Captain Jaffe, Crawford instigates a war of nerves on Wescott, hoping to force the shape-changing alien to reveal itself.

Given the concept of an alien metamorph which can disguise itself as anyone, many a writer would have gone for a whodunnit, raising the paranoia about who the intruder could be. This episode is certainly filled with tension but it is more that of a pressure cooker, slowly ratcheting up the atmosphere. We learn the identity of the ‘counterfeit man’ almost immediately, but tellingly we only know through the conclusions of Dr Crawford. This creates a different kind of tension in the first half, is the doctor correct? In most shipboard dramas, the doctor is a figure of calm reason and authority, but early on it becomes clear that Crawford is quite highly strung for an officer and no poker player, his voice cracking with emotion when he discusses matters with Jaffe. Wescott shows none of the obvious signs of alienness. His speech is natural, his gaze remains un-zombiefied, he only starts to look around suspiciously after he himself falls under suspicion of a crime we know he did not commit. Is Crawford persecuting an innocent man due to his own imagination? David Hemmings is excellent as the likable, increasingly angry Wescott, whilst Alexander Davion hits the right balance between authority and discomfort.

It’s striking looking episode with a large impressive spaceship control deck in gleaming white and chrome. For a story about stealing identities, the crew are strangely clone-like with their near-identical blonde wigs and uniforms. Watching the show with the sound off, you might think that the men (and they are all men, no token female presence here) would talk in a cold, formal fashion. In fact the atmosphere is much more reminiscent of sailors on a navy vessel. “There’s nothing more reassuring than the body of a woman!”, sighs one fellow early on.

But instead of launching into a rendition of “Nothing Like a Dame” at this point, we are treated to the only real weak spot of this episode, the mental breakdown and death of Donnie. Rather than harrowing, this moment is unfortunately quite funny as actor Peter Fraser shouts and staggers around the room, being studiously ignored by the other astronauts. It’s not surprising that Nigel Planer picked it out for his spoof acting class How to Be SF.

As Crawford’s campaign begins to take its toll, the production takes on the feel of experimental theatre. Long tracking shots and close-ups of Wescott looking strung out, soundtracked by some excellent stock music and radiophonic effects I’m pretty sure I’ve previously heard in the Doctor Who adventure The Moonbase. Eventually the story reveals its hand, and Wescott is revealed as an extra-terrestrial in an impressively gloopy special effect sequence, lit with pulsing lights.

If the story had ended here it would have been satisfactory, but a final act pushes it into excellence. With the spacecraft quarantined on Earth, Crawford returns to it only to find his worst fears confirmed, there was a second alien on board. Others might follow what happens better, but to me the climax is interestingly ambiguous. Was the second alien Jaffe, which is what Crawford accuses to the empty room, or does his own fear and paranoia lead him to accidentally release the second alien from its specimen jar when he blasts a workbench with his gun? Either way I was quite struck by the explicitness of the final laser-crisped body, horrible even in monochrome. The production also smartly keeps the aliens’ motivation obscure. We never find out why they want to infiltrate the ship or reach the Earth. This lack of information is intriguing rather than frustrating. Nothing would be clumsier than one of the beings giving a speech about their plans for conquest or tourism.

Let me give  special acknowledgement to George Spenton Foster, who not only directs this striking episode, but as Associate Producer was also instrumental in getting this technically challenging series on to BBC2 in the first place. The Counterfeit Man is notable improvement on the opening story and has aged in quite a cool Sixties retro way.

No Place Like Earth

Two colonists watch alien miners

I enjoy SF TV anthologies a great deal. American television has tended to dominate this field from The Twilight Zone downwards, but the BBC has provided a handful of worthy entries, none more so than Out of the Unknown. As I was growing up it was a series that was an intriguing mystery for me. Mentioned in passing during articles on Doctor Who but fairly undocumented in the main. Certainly never repeated. I caught up with a few episodes in my tape-trading days but I never thought that an official box set would emerge as handsome as the one that has.

Beginning in 1965 and running for four seasons on BBC2, Out of the Unknown was the brainchild of producer Irene Shubik. An experienced story editor who had worked on the acclaimed ABC anthology Armchair Theatre, she had a long-standing love of literary science fiction and felt intelligent, notable short stories and novels would make good thought-provoking television drama. She probably also wanted to prove that SF could deal with adult dilemmas, as well as simple juvenile escapism.

I recently received the British Film Institute’s splendid Out of the Unknown DVD box set for Christmas. A talented team has not only expertly restored all the existing episodes in the BBC archives, but added four reconstructions of lost episodes, created some interesting looking extras and finished it off with a scholarly booklet on the history of the series. So I thought it might be a fun idea to share my thoughts of the series with you as I watch it.

No Place Like Earth
by John Wyndham
Adapted by Stanley Miller

What is it about most anthology titles sequences that they tend to the sinister? It’s hard to think of any that do not have a feeling of impending threat to them. Out of the Unknown is no different, a sequence of abstract images (including a fear-struck man’s face) whilst Norman Kay’s music features a swooping harp and muted horns that end on a note of suspense. Man is definitely not going boldly to the final frontier here, he is treading warily. It is an effective opening though and feels very much of its Sixties era.

Earth has been destroyed and the remains of humanity are surviving on several small colonies. One of them is Mars, where Bert drifts along the canals, trading his repair skills for provisions and dreaming of the old days. Annika, the matriarch of one of his favourite Martian families is keen for him to marry her eldest daughter, but Bert is restless. His answer seems to come when a ship arrives from Venus, recruiting men to create a new Earth on that hostile planet. But he soon finds that Venus is far from the brave new start he hoped for.

Based on two Wyndham stories stitched together, Time to Rest and No Place Like Earth, this opening installment still feels a bit padded out. Apparently producer Irene Shubik was unhappy with how the episode had turned out and wanted to launch with The Counterfeit Man by Alan E Nourse but was overruled by head of drama Sydney Newman who preferred using a more famous author. With its canals, noble savage Martians and a jungle Venus it is clearly a whimsical science fantasy and old-fashioned even by Sixties standards. The elegiac theme of Bert’s nostalgia for an Earth that never was recalls to something of the later chapters of The Martian Chronicles, except Bradbury’s stories are richer and their fantastical elements are more clearly shown to be a deliberate style of the novel with his re-imaging of Mars as the American mid-west. It’s not a bad story by any means and well-acted, but it often just plods and everything is spelled out when it could have been left as subtext. The biggest offender is an elderly Venus colonist who gives a long long speech describing the oppressive crooked society that has arisen on Venus since the Earth’s destruction. However Terrance Morgan is a good lead as the idealistic dreamer Bert and it is fine to see a young bewitching Hannah Gordon as Zaylo, the Martian maid who wants to domesticate him.

Designer Peter Seddon’s set for the Martian ruins is an excellent creation, recalling Egyptian and Mayan architecture. The spacesuits and Venus overalls are somewhat cartoonish by comparison but the realisation of the primitive native Venusians is quite clever in using stocking masks to obscure their faces.

Reading the booklet I discovered this episode under-ran by six minutes. It did not feel like that. I think better is to come.