Destination: Moonbase Alpha (41 page)

On this subject, Christopher Penfold has said: ‘Barry Morse was reminding us that we, the writers, had very little opportunity to engage with the cast, and that’s true. I actually very much like getting feedback from the cast. It is they who realise the characters. That’s a cross-fertilisation process that there ought to be more time for. In the case of a theatre production, the play will be in rehearsal for several weeks before it’s actually opened. The writer will be there working with the cast in the early stage – of course there has to be a time when the script is the script – but there isn’t, in television, the opportunity for that kind of engagement. [Having said that,] we did have very useful engagement, or at least I did, with Martin and Barbara. I spent long hours into the night at their house talking about scripts, which I think was useful. It would have been very nice to have had more time to be able to do that with Zienia, Prentis and Barry.’

Regarding the writers, and the writing, Johnny Byrne stated: ‘You had first of all Chris Penfold, who is the son of a vicar and who had a strong moral and social conscience and believed passionately in good. He also was an experienced writer, but these were his personal characteristics … Chris Penfold was also sort of a liberal socialist. He would consider himself a liberal ideologue. He would see himself as someone who would be willing to sacrifice in order to salve his conscience. He was born with guilt. People of that type are born with guilt … The Irish are different. There’s a larger degree of mysticism in our background, and the mystical and the spiritual are very closely connected … I had come from a very Irish sort of Catholic family, with an ingrained sensitivity to spiritual matters … You only have to look at the episodes to see the consistency of our points of view. There’s a running thing through my episodes that never really alters very much. It has many different faces, but essentially we were looking at the equivalent of mystery and miracles – the reassertion of, and the reenactment of, certain basic universal elements, so to speak. These
Space: 1999
episodes were a reflection of that, of two very different things.

‘And there was Eddie di Lorenzo, who was also very interested in mental attitudes. He was a very sensitive writer, a very good one in my estimation. The three of us together almost chemically sparked off the kind of feeling that washed over all the episodes, even those we didn’t write. There was a feeling, a concern … to carry the feeling of the humanity of the people on Moonbase Alpha out there, not necessarily as a spoken dialogue, but something in terms of the situations and [the characters’] responses, and their utter bewilderment. These were our people, our younger brothers and children, who were out there. And they should have echoed our concerns, our feelings of … human beings in a tremendous state of transition and change, with all their weaknesses and limitations. So that feeling carried over and was reflected in some of the stories that might have qualified as soft; certainly they were thoughtful, certainly they were exciting – but it was a good mix. We just went for stories that attracted us. And while some of the stories I wrote Chris didn’t approve of – and some of the ones he wrote I didn’t approve of, and the same with Eddie – that was the way it was. “The Last Sunset”, “The Last Enemy”, “Space Brain” – [those] and I think … one other one [were the ones] I didn’t particularly like …

‘Among the ones I didn’t write I like particularly “Black Sun”. I [also] love “War Games”. I love what everybody else loves about this. You can’t ignore the [ones] Anthony Terpiloff wrote, which are wonderful as well. I love the richness and the variety of the first season. The sense that something greater than the sum of the events we were recording seems to have taken hold of us early on. It showed itself most clearly in those episodes where the Mysterious Unkown Force, or MUF, is presumed to be present; and looking back, it was also there in many others. But it was never the result of any form of preplanning. It seems to have been working itself out below the level of conscious intent.’

Barry Morse stated: ‘We must always go back to the guys who really engendered all of this, Chris [Penfold] and Johnny [Byrne] and George [Bellak]. They’re the fellows who made it all happen. But they were confronted, as we were, with an almost impossible situation … I must eternally remind you that the real engenderers of any dramatic piece are the fellows who put the words together’

Would Christopher Penfold have done anything differently, if he had the opportunity? ‘Adequate time in which to prepare scripts before going into production would be pretty much top of the list. Adequate time also in which to find and talk to and fully engage writers – I mean, I really don’t like, as a script editor, simply having to reach the point where I have to take somebody else’s material over because I haven’t the time to educate them fully into the ways of the series. I would like writers to be responsible for their own development within a series. And the fact that finding the right writers is actually a very difficult thing to do. Every script editor worth his or her salt has a whole stock of knowledge about who writes well in which genre, and who might be appropriate for each particular story. This is what script editors do … Every writer has, like fingerprints, an individual tone of voice. The role of the script editor is to facilitate the expression of that voice. I would say what I would have liked would be to have continued in the same philosophical direction that we embarked on in series one, but to give us the time and resources to find the right people, because in the end it’s the writers who give you what makes the series. The more they speak in their own voice, the more you get a quality of difference in each episode; so that the audience is almost subconsciously engaging with a different intelligence. Of course, there are overall series rules that have to be obeyed, but the real quality comes from the contributions of individual writers.’

What did the actors feel about their characters, or their fellow performers? Nick Tate begins: ‘I was very lucky with [my character] Alan Carter. I think basically what happened with all of us in the series was that we felt rather like all the people that were on the Moon. We were out at Pinewood Studios, which is a long way from anything else – it’s out in a farm district. The rest of the English acting fraternity didn’t really dig what we were doing. They didn’t understand it. They thought it was some strange American implant. And it was, in a way. We were a tight-knit little group … As Alan Carter, I was allowed to do a lot of things that came naturally to me. The writers would meet with me and talk about the ideas I had. I actually wrote the history of my character – my own ideas. That was more important in the second series when the new people came in. When Freddy [Freiberger] came in, I had to let him know who my character really was. I would not have done anything differently [as Alan Carter], other than that I would have liked a little more to do. But when you work in a television series like that, there are a lot of people to serve, and everybody wanted more to do. I was very, very lucky.’

Barry Morse stated: ‘I’ve generally felt that
Space: 1999
dealt much too much in hardware and special effects and not enough in thoughts, philosophies and feelings. As to [the frequent criticism of] the characters being one-dimensional and wooden, I understand Martin and Barbara have had some good things to say about the development of the characters, but my recollection is, I’m afraid, rather different. It is my firm opinion that the characters
were
one-dimensional and wooden. Martin and Barbara should be congratulated just as much as I should be that we managed to squeeze out something approaching an individual character for ourselves, because we had very little to go on in the way of writing.’

Prentis Hancock related: ‘I asked for more definition of character, to know more about his background. I kept being told, “You’ll be told. This will happen.” I would have liked Paul to get out and about more. Go to more planet surfaces. You have to balance things. Carter was a character who went bouncing around in spaceships, and it would have been great fun to go out with him, and to go out with Koenig. But actually I was supposed to be in control of Main Mission. I wasn’t the action man, in that sense … I tried to play Paul terribly English in a sense, because everybody else in the series was kind of playing American, or mid-Atlantic. I was, in a way, the only Brit. I tried to make it the centre of Paul Morrow’s character – [to indicate] that he was the Main Mission Controller [and] the calm at the centre of the storm. The trouble with that is it isn’t terribly dramatic. You can be calm for hours and everybody goes to sleep. So we had to strike a balance. We had a lot of leading characters, and three stars. I sort of led the second eleven, and that’s an awful lot of people to spread the camera around and give them screen time. Plus guest stars … What I’m saying is there wasn’t a lot to work with, because I was sitting in the same place week after week, doing the same sort of things. So I just tried to make him the centre of the storm, really, so when he blew, it was really quite interesting.

‘One week Paul Morrow was taking Sandra out, and then the next week he didn’t speak to her. Then he was taking Tanya out, which is fine, but … There is a skill now that has developed in long-running series called storylining. Take any series, there will be people who decide, “This line of stories on this family will go in this direction for the next couple of years and they’ll end up over here. This other family will go this way and end up over there. Then in two years time we’ll have some reason why this family gets it together with that family and they reconnect.” Through that, writers are commissioned to write different stories. There might be six or seven different threads or storylines going out in different directions. I don’t think we had
one
line in
Space: 1999
– apart from the fact that we keep going away from the Earth. I suspect that’s why you get these sort of inconsistencies. And you just have to do it. Okay, I’m not talking to Sandra this week. Or, we’re going out onto the Moon to have a kiss, or whatever we do. And you just have to accept that and do the best you can with it.

‘
But you know when we started I don’t think they had more than one script idea, or one script written. Taking six and a half weeks to do the first episode, “Breakaway”, allowed them time to write episode two. They’ve never denied it. It’s very nice to think of the writers being with you, but they were in a room over there – they used to come in once in a blue moon to see us. I wish there had been more interaction, but I think they were fairly overloaded with what they had to do.’

Anton Phillips reflected on his place in the cast: ‘I suspect the reason
Clifton and I were in it, and perhaps to some extent Zienia, was the American audience. I don’t think they could have shown a major television series in America with an all-white cast. So certainly I think it was convenient for them to have Clifton and me in it. And, at the end of the day, I think they satisfied the minimum requirement [for ethnic actors], in as much as neither Clifton nor I really ever featured in any of the major storylines. Prentis did. Zienia did. Nick did. Barry, obviously … But I don’t think I ever featured in the main storyline.’

Regarding character background, Phillips stated: ‘I was given nothing at all, like most everybody else. This was my fourth job after studying acting in drama school and I think my very first, or second, television job. I had certainly no experience in a film studio. So I was really making it up as I went along. I had no idea what was going on. I was a stage actor; I was trained for the stage, and this was all really new to me. As we went along, I learned the profession of being a film actor and at the same time trying to put something together for the character. It sort of came together by accident, I guess … There were some nice moments when you actually got a chance to do something. All the people you see are really quite fine actors and have proven themselves time and time again on all sorts of things on stage, screen and television. So when we actually got an opportunity to
do
something, the danger was that we would overdo it. “Hey, finally a little bit of acting!” And we’d leap on there and beat it to death, when we really needed a light touch. So those moments were nice when they did come along.’

Zienia Merton recalled: ‘Sandra fainted a lot. It was Ray Austin who said, “Hang on a minute … She can’t keep falling down. If she keeps falling down, what’s she doing on this base? Surely she must have done all these tests, gravity things and whatever, … and this woman’s loopy! Consistently falling down.” And so, luckily, some other poor girl had to fall down on that episode, and I obviously carried on. It would be quite strange that suddenly I would become
extremely
responsible. When they wanted everybody to be in Medical Centre helping out, Sandra’s at the helm. She’s running Main Mission. That was in “War Games”. And I liked all that. But I had very little contribution toward the scripts. Trying to get those scripts out, we just didn’t have the luxury to have little chats … So Sandra came and went depending on what was needed of her.

‘Back in the ’70s it was all hair and teeth … Girls were little dolls then. The ladies on
Space: 1999
did actually work hard for their money. They did go out and do things. I know a lot of people are not very happy with the Andersons – one way or the other – but in
UFO
, too, they did actually use women not as pretty set pieces but as creative working people.’

Johnny Byrne observed: ‘Martin Landau is a very visceral actor, and [with Koenig] an emotional response was always jumping in ahead of the logical response. It was always a question of which would jump first. What determined it was the nature of the question. It didn’t matter who it was coming from, whether it was one of his own, an alien, an official, a superior – whatever it was, if it hit off any of those buttons that Commander Koenig held sacred … you could almost feel the fear in the man. He defended [his principles] so fiercely. So he was a man who was obviously not secure in that position, but he defended them with tremendous fierceness, even when they were not necessarily under attack. So anything of that nature would be no surprise for Martin to respond in this way as John Koenig. Koenig was a man very, very much aware of his own mortality.