Destination: Moonbase Alpha (3 page)

Of Dr Helena Russell, the Writer’s Guide states: ‘Her cool good looks belie her abilities and her responsibilities … A woman in her early thirties (born, say, in 1965) whose father was a West Coast physician of great energy and drive.’ Barbara Bain herself has explained that in her own envisioning of the character, she decided that Helena’s father had been the one to discover the cure for cancer. There was thus a pressure on her to live up to the expectations put upon her by following her father’s footsteps in the medical profession. The Writer’s Guide also states: ‘Helena drove through medical school, where she met and married a fellow student … Telford Russell … Telford became a medical mission man – going out into space. Helena, now in her late twenties, worked at NASA and delved into space disorientation and psychology … Then a mission disappeared into space … Telford was on that mission, and Helena to all intents and purposes was widowed. Helena grieved and then went on working and living her full and liberated life … As we pick Dr Russell up, she has been on Alpha for 12 months, working and living, and to some extent retiring emotionally in that space womb environment.’

Barbara Bain’s hairstyle for Year One was created by Michael Rassner, of famed London salon Michaeljohn. Rassner was quoted as saying at the time of the series: ‘The Barbara Bain assignment was a difficult one. Her hair, as it is today, suits her so perfectly that I doubt if she will change it very much in the future – even in 1999! I had several things to bear in mind. One: Miss Bain is portraying a girl stranded on the Moon when it breaks out of orbit, and as she wouldn’t have hairdressers around her she would need something simple that she could control herself. Two: it was necessary to keep to a style that would suit her own personality. Three: it would be her own hair and not a wig – and that she would therefore have to be seen outside the studios as well as on the screen with whatever style I chose … It is basically classical. The colouring is very much Barbara Bain’s own, but I have taken the silver of the Moon to symbolise the setting by introducing blonde highlights, which give a subtle lift for the hair. She is lucky. Her hair is fantastically lovely.’

Professor Victor Bergman is also detailed in the Writer’s Guide, although his name had not at that point been determined. The Guide states, ‘The Professor, born in the early ’40s, is a brilliant teacher and theoretician. Rarely involved in worldly things, the Professor nonetheless achieved a reputation as a tremendous mind in force-field theory… John Koenig was one of the Professor’s outstanding students years ago. Since then, a bond of affection has grown between them.’ It goes on to say: ‘The Professor looks upon his times with a somewhat rueful eye. He is more of a throwback – a 19
th
Century scientist-philosopher-humanist – and he is an intellectual counterbalance to the 21
st
Century we are about to enter.’ The Guide goes on to explain that the Professor has an artificial heart.

Barry Morse explains how he joined the series: ‘It came about, like so many things do in our lives, by a series of flukes and coincidences. There was a great, very prominent British producer (long gone now, but at the time probably the most prominent producer in the UK) called Lew Grade, for whom I had done two series (
The Adventurer
and
The Zoo Gang
). He had an option on my services and said to me, “Do you want to take up the option and come play in this whole new series we’re going to film based on a science fiction scheme, called
Space: 1999
?” I asked where it was going to be shot and learned it was to be shot in London – well, Pinewood. By this time, my wife Sydney and I had been visiting and working a great deal in other countries all over Europe, so the idea of doing a series that was going to be shot entirely in London was very appealing. So I said, “Shall I look at some scripts?” He said, “Well, that’s the trouble. We don’t really have what you might call a completed script.” I said, “Excuse me, Lew, I think there’s something wrong with the phone. I thought I just heard you say that you’re starting a series and you don’t even have a single completed script.” Indeed it was so. There’s Lew Grade, Mr Lord High Everything in our profession, and he’s apparently prepared to embark on this thing without a single polished script. So I thought, “He’s got courage.” When he told me that Martin and Barbara were going to be in it, I thought, “Well, they’ve got courage. And they’re good pros and they know what they’re doing.” So I thought, “Why not?” and I signed up, as it were.’

The Writer’s Guide character outlines were apparently never shown to the actors (although the details provided might still have seemed insufficient to the performers, even if they were aware of them). Barry Morse, for example, has stated, ‘We started out with not even the bare bones of who our characters were. We had to put flesh on whatever skeleton was there for us, out of our own imaginations. It’s not a question of adding something of one’s self to the role, but something of what one perceives, or conceives, as the character that one is being called upon to play. I did write a biography of dear Victor Bergman, because going into the series there was virtually no indication of the nature of the characters at all, beyond the fact that Victor Bergman was the oldest inhabitant and a kind of “Space Uncle”. Among other things, I remembered the sort of people in the world that are, or have been, or might become Victor Bergmans.

‘I didn’t want Bergman to be the typical, anonymous American, which was indicated in the initial script. I didn’t think he was entirely British, either. I visualised he acquired a kind of orthodox English accent, more or less like my own, by virtue of having spent many of his more mature years as a professor at one of the older universities in the UK. I thought Victor should be a chap of a varied background and of mixed race – ultimately a great deal more eccentric and individual than he eventually became. I felt a chap who was the scientific expert on the crew of Moonbase Alpha could perhaps have a European origin. I visualized his having been brought as a child refugee out of Austria, before the War, because one of his parents was partly Jewish (which I took from his name). He then studied in various parts of the world, principally and more recently, in England. I worked out all the chronological details to bring him up to the age he was presumed to be.

‘Of course, an obvious comparison was somebody like Einstein, who was a keen musician. I used to play the fiddle very badly, and I thought it might be fun if somewhere down the line, during some emergency, Victor was twiddling away a bit of Mozart. But we never did it. Once in a while, when I got the chance, I would whistle bits of one of the Brandenburg Concertos as a little thing to help him along when he was working something out. I hoped I was going to be able to make more than infrequent use of that device. I did think Victor was particularly interested in music, specifically that of Johann Sebastian Bach – it is the kind of music that would appeal to a man with a scientific mind as it is so marvellously organised. I saw Victor as someone who is so much concerned with abstruse scientific matters that he has very little knowledge of, or interest in, the day-to-day happenings of the world. I looked on him as being an absent-minded and other-worldly chap who might tend to put on odd socks, wear a cardigan with the elbows out, go about in tennis shoes without the laces, and be generally untidy and careless about his dress and appearance. He might have a rather unkempt beard and straggly hair, and be, in other words, kind of an absent-minded professor. I didn’t fully succeed, of course.

‘I tried as tactfully as I could to inject a bit of humanity, but starting a large scale series as we did with only one script, many people would say is an act of blatant insanity. It is as if Shakespeare had arranged for the first production of
Hamlet
after he had written the first line. Where is it going to go? So what we were able to do in clothing with flesh, you might say, the very sketchy characters that were laid out for us was mostly a matter of the inventive imagination of the actors involved. Inevitably as time went by certain characteristics were fastened on, certain interests were battened on, and so forth. But it wasn’t by any means a completed work of art when we started.’

The character of Main Mission Controller Paul Morrow, portrayed by actor Prentis Hancock, was originally to have been a Russian called Vorkonen. Hancock explains how he joined the series: ‘Out of my work on
The Protectors
… I was just offered
Space: 1999
. Most of my work during my life has been actually just offered …. [They said,] “Come and see [the director] Lee Katzin.” I did, on a Saturday morning. Lee H Katzin talked about the series and I thought, “Wow, that sounds fantastic,” but … I was working for the BBC and I was thinking about which of the parts was the right one to do. Well, as the money was astronomically higher [for
Space: 1999
] than the BBC used to pay, there was no question in my mind what to do. I got back and I looked at [the script] and read it again, and I thought, “The part of Carter is the one to go for.” On the Monday my agent phoned, and I said, “I think Carter …” and he said, “Well don’t worry about it, we’ve already done the deal on Morrow.” And that was it. He’d done the deal before I went to see Sylvia and Gerry, so there was no question of auditioning for it, or anything like that.

‘They were saying [my character] Paul was the second in command. I was the fourth lead on the show. When I first went to work, there were four of us on it. The rest of the cast joined in the following week. And I had every reason to think this was going to go very, very big … When it started shooting, it was the most expensive television series ever made. There was a two-page spread in
Variety
the day we started shooting at Pinewood Studios, advertising how expensive our new production was … We all thought we would be Hollywood bound in five years.

‘There were a number of first days. I joined in for costumes and getting to know people… Gerry and Sylvia were there all the time doing things. Barbara and Martin were moved in, and so was Barry. That was like the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and I think I joined
on about the Thursday. People joined all the time until we got everybody together, and then there were about 300 of us who walked on to M stage, where this enormous set was. What was quite nice about the set was, although it was enormous, it was not intimidating. You didn’t walk onto it and think about the big arches and panels and what-have-you, and miles of space. The whole thing had an intimacy about it. I think it was the tables and chairs, so it was quite office-y, and that kept it human in scale, in spite of it being quite large, and large in terms of television. We filled more than half of M stage, which was one of the big stages at Pinewood.’

Dr Bob Mathias, played by actor Anton Phillips, was originally conceived as the Japanese Dr Fujita. Phillips states: ‘I hadn’t heard anything at all about
Space: 1999
. I didn’t know it was happening. I was in a play at a very small theatre called the King’s Head Pub … very small. This was a lunchtime play I was doing. It was very
avant-garde
. I didn’t have any idea what it was about! Neither did anybody else in the play, or the director, or the writer! Michael Barnes, the casting director [for
Space: 1999
] came to see another actor in the play and invited me to come to Pinewood Studios the next day. I went in and they asked me to do one episode, and after they looked at the rushes, they invited me to be in all the remaining episodes. It was purely by accident and the rest is history, as they say.’

Phillips also said, ‘
My trip to Pinewood Studios to do the spot was my first time in a film studio. So coming in and having Barbara and Martin as examples of what to aspire to was great. I couldn’t have had better role models in acting technique, and everything else. I was very lucky. I worked mainly with Barbara; not so much with Martin, and it was wonderful …
Space: 1999
, when I got the part, was I think the third part I had had, out of drama school. No, it was more than that, but walking onto a movie set – that was the first time I had been into a studio. There’s a kind of magic to walking on to work in Pinewood Studios. It was all really magical for me, and it was all a learning experience as well. That’s where I met some really terrific people; worked with some very helpful directors – Charlie Crichton, Ray Austin; and it was just great for me. Sylvia Anderson was really so nice to me. It was all just like a kid in a candy shop, really.’

Until the last minute, the producers were trying to find an actor to play the final uncast regular role – Italian Eagle pilot Alfonso Catani. Actor Nick Tate explains that he was offered two different series at the same time: ‘One of them was
Space: 1999
. I had a very positive meeting with Sylvia Anderson and her casting director, but they told me the show was all cast and that the most they could do was bring me in as a guest star in the first episode (as a doomed astronaut). After the usual wait, both the productions suddenly rang and offered me work. I had to choose. I think I must have been clairvoyant. I decided to go with [the guest star part in]
Space: 1999
, because the whole concept of it appealed to me. I wasn’t really a huge science fiction fan, but I’d read some Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, who I really thought was a wonderful man. Also, I was a pretty gung-ho kind of a young kid. I liked surfing a lot and riding horses, so I always wanted to get into a cowboy movie. The thought of playing an astronaut appealed to me in a similar vein.

‘Gerry [Anderson] said to me [when I started on the show], “I have to tell you – I don’t like actors.” Great beginning! I was like, “Thanks a lot, Gerry, I feel really secure about that!” But he was okay. I got on very well with Gerry.