Something to watch tonight: Thursday 4 September

Space: 1999 (Anderson, 1975-1977)

A few weeks ago there was a brief news story about Nasa plan­ning to install a nuc­le­ar react­or on the moon by 2030 which — to people of a cer­tain age — will have raised an eye­brow or two.

The incit­ing incid­ent of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s epic sci-fi show Space: 1999 is the explo­sion of poorly stored nuc­le­ar waste on the moon, cata­pult­ing it and the occu­pants of the research sta­tion Moonbase Alpha out of Earth orbit and off on a jour­ney of dis­cov­ery across the galaxy.

Coincidentally, this week is the 50^th anniversary of the first broad­cast of Space: 1999 on British tele­vi­sion. It was the cul­min­a­tion of dec­ades of adven­ture TV from the Andersons that star­ted with the Supermarionation of Torchy the Battery Boy, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Joe 90, et al, through the live action years of U.F.O. and The Protectors.

Budgets were big­ger — ITC boss Lew Grade expec­ted it to sell well inter­na­tion­ally1 — which meant big­ger sets, bet­ter effects and two well-known stars. Real life couple Martin Landau and Barbara Bain had worked togeth­er on sev­er­al sea­sons of Mission: Impossible and they were reunited as the lead­er and chief med­ic­al officer of Moonbase Alpha respectively.

While the stor­ies were fairly deriv­at­ive — Star Trek had recently roared back into pop­ular­ity thanks to reruns and its ‘ali­en of the week’ mod­el was highly influ­en­tial — for audi­ences of roughly my age and gender it was the excep­tion­al design that made the biggest impres­sion. Anderson’s shows always had the coolest gear and the Eagle space­ship was a prized diecast toy for sev­er­al years.

The rel­at­ive lack of sales suc­cess of sea­son one meant that sea­son two was retooled to be more appeal­ing to American TV execs. There was a more pas­sion­ate romance between Bain and Landau’s char­ac­ters, an ali­en sci­ence officer was intro­duced (played by Catherine Schell with extraordin­ary plaited eye­brows) and some forced humour brought in to bal­ance the exist­en­tial drama.

To help cov­er costs, Grade had epis­odes recut into fea­ture films for the­at­ric­al release and all of them are about to be released on Blu-ray by Imprint Entertainment. The box also includes the rarely seen Italian com­pil­a­tion of three sea­son one epis­odes, Spazza: 1999, with music by Ennio Morricone!

Morricone may be the mas­ter but nobody did this kind of theme tune bet­ter than Barry Gray. I think this Space: 1999 theme is the best thing he did and I leave you with the abso­lute boss ver­sion of it by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Where to watch Space: 1999

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: There are sev­er­al Blu-ray edi­tions of the com­plete two-season 48-episode col­lec­tion avail­able although prices are not exactly bar­gain base­ment. Rough rips of the DVDs have also been uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Aotearoa: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Australia: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Canada: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Ireland: Streaming on Prime Video

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on Prime Video, Peacock, Fubo, Pluto or ShoutTV

UK: Streaming on ITVx