The Far-Flung Future of 1980
As I sit here typing away on my iMac after telling Alexa to turn the lights on, it becomes clear to me that the future I was anticipating in those far off summer holidays of 1971, has been well and truly exceeded. Gerry Anderson’s tv shows were the window into the future for me and my pals in those days of yore. The standout show for us was UFO, Anderson’s first live-action series, with an exciting glimpse of things to come, or rather, how we imagined life would be. My household was still watching a black & white television, but we knew the colour palette of UFO because we had the 3D Viewmaster set, and the full-color comic strips in Countdown.
The graphically stylish Countdown was the worthy successor to TV21, and featured some truly great artists; my favourites being John M. Burns, Ron Embleton and Gerry Haylock. The biggest draw was the UFO strip, featuring the super-secret S.H.A.D.O. (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organisation), and set in the far-flung future of 1980!
I remember sitting with my two pals, Ian and Manny in Ian's parent's coal-bunker which we'd turned into a base of operations (after we'd swept up the coal dust) for our own secret organisation, SPI: Strange Phenomena Investigators. We each had security clearance ID cards of course, for which I found my original logo roughs a few years ago in my parent's attic. A black cat with an arched back. I think I made it more pronounced for the finished thing. I wish I still had it… Oh, well, we can't keep everything... (though I've tried my best).
Here it is. Obviously not a corporate branding masterpiece, but I was eleven years old at the time!
Anyway, there we were in our base of operations wondering what we'd be doing all those years later, in 1980. How incredibly old we'd be, and with Sylvia Anderson’s Moonbase Alpha costume designs in mind, wondering if all women of the future would be wearing purple wigs and silver fashions.
There had already been a live-action Gerry Anderson SF film called Doppelgänger (later retitled Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) that my father had taken me to see at the cinema in 1969, but my first sighting of UFO was on the telly during a childhood trip to Ipswich in September 1970, where for some reason it was being aired way ahead of London. The fact that packs of Oat Krunchies, my favourite breakfast cereal at the time, had begun to feature a guy called Ed Straker on the box suddenly all made sense.
I was chatting to my Marvel UK and 2000 AD colleague, John Tomlinson about his favourite recollections of the show, and I'll quote him here...
JT: That was one of the best things about Gerry Anderson's stuff. No matter how outlandish and preposterous the concepts he flung at you, they were executed with such style and slickness, such cool costumes and visuals that it didn't seem to matter. Absolutely nothing in UFO really worked from a practical point of view (three measly interceptors with ONE cumbersome missile each? Gedouddahere! And how come the UFOs weren't constantly blowing that orbital snitch SID out of the sky?), but it looked fantastic.
No memory of UFO could ever eclipse the image of Gabrielle Drake in her bacofoil bikini. But I also liked the grim scenes between Straker and Freeman in which one would say to the other 'Anything?' and the other inevitably replied 'Nothing.' Seemed to happen every week. I still do that with people now!
Straker was such an old sexist. He never seemed to know what to say to women, except demand that they perform menial tasks or fix him a drink. If he ever did get the helmet off a female UFO pilot he'd probably just smirk and ask ‘how about a nice cup of alien cworfee?’
There have been CGI reboots of Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet and Thunderbirds, and I had heard rumors of a possible UFO reboot a few years ago, though I can't quite imagine how a reworked version of the show would look. Having briefly worked on the first (cancelled) version of the Thunderbirds movie myself, (mentioned here) I know that certain aspects are changed to make them more contemporary, but the things that make them appealing in the first place are the things that would probably be first out of the window. Would anyone in their right mind apply for a job to work on the moon, where purple wigs and silver mini-skirts were compulsory attire? I mean, c'mon! How could a government agency enforce such a ridiculous dress code on their operatives? String vests for our submarine division? White slim-fit catsuits for our ground staff? Makes total sense - not! And yet this was all part of the appeal of the show and what made it look so incredibly cool to us as kids in the 1970's.
Below, one of the grooviest TV intro's ever, in my opinion...Â
Meanwhile, on SHADO Moonbase…
Well, I watched this and it made me laugh. Ed Straker smoking in the workplace, and Lt. Gay Ellis changing into a mini-skirt so she can have a coffee break. It’s slightly ludicrous! The past is definitely another country.
Update: apparently the above video doesn’t show in the UK, but this one does.
If there’s anyone else out there who enjoyed watching UFO at the time, please leave a comment. Thanks!
Thanks for the quotes Steve! Although it sounds as if I'm taking the piss I genuinely love UFO – one of those rare series that actually gets better as it goes on. Timelash is stunning – ingenious concept and the action never lets up. And Mindbender is as nutty and (literally) fourth wall-breaking as anything Patrick McGoohan dreamed up in The Prisoner.
Loved it (when I could find it shunted around the ITV schedule), more serious yet also more preposterous than Space 1999. I prefer the vehicles on UFO though. I bought the (Australian?) boxset a few years ago but haven’t dared watch it in case it destroys my memory of it.