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Post by Dr Strange on May 3, 2017 15:36:43 GMT
Alternative Three is worth watching for the story which surrounds it... I remember that one. What I didn't know until 5 minutes ago when I googled it, was that the original screenplay was by David Ambrose (author of Superstition, among others - an old favourite of mine).
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Post by pulphack on May 3, 2017 16:40:32 GMT
UFO was a victim, like many of Lew Grade's ITC shows, of being at the mercy of syndication rather than network scheduling in the USA, with the result that its showing was piecemeal - I read in Robert Sellar's excellent ITC history that Ed Bishop was working as a decorator in New York when UFO first aired there, and the family for whom he was doing some painting and paperhanging invited him to sit down and watch himself. Must have been odd. (Mind you, I heard Fast Eddie Clark say the same thing about the first time Motorhead were on TOTP!).
Alternative Three was astounding at the time - in fact, it still is damn good - and the only thing that gave it away for me was recognising Shane Rimmer (blimey, that bloke from UFO was really an astronaut??)and also noting that the copyright date was not just a year but April 1st (I wasn't that anal, honest, I was just still riveted to the screen). I think it was supposed to be shown on that date but a technician's strike buggered that one! It's worth picking up the dvd for the discussion between the producer, director and the guy who played the anchorman, which is also fascinating.
Jason King - I'm never sure if it was intended to be a parody to begin with, or if it was just Dennis Spooner giving in to Peter Wyngarde's inclination to be arch enough for a viaduct. The character was too overpowering as a lead, but worked great flitting in and out of Dept S.
Steve - fifty something is the new forty. I'm determined to make it so...
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Post by cromagnonman on May 3, 2017 17:27:55 GMT
Mr. Cromagnon man, you crack me up! I don't recall Jane's episode of UFO but she did some good ones with Peter Wyngarde in Dept. S and the infamous Jason King (which was a camp parody of every ITV action series of the Sixties). I thought she was quite attractive but perhaps my opinion when it comes to feminine wiles is not to be trusted? She has a nice website I visited briefly a few years ago. Thanks again for a smile--I needed it on this crusty day... cheers, H. ithankyouithankyou Mr H. I'm here through Saturday. Dvds and merchandise are available in the foyer.
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Post by helrunar on May 3, 2017 17:35:09 GMT
It mentions in Bishop's Wikipedia entry that he and Shane Rimmer used to refer to themselves in the plural as founding members of the "Rent-a-Yank" agency in the UK. I thought that showed an excellent sense of humor. I'd never heard that Bishop worked as a decorator in between gigs. He was in Whoops Apocalypse (which may or may not be featured in Bloody Hell Mate, the Eighties left SCARS) and I remember him for a good supporting role in what may be my personal fave episode of the Brian Clemens Thriller series, "Nurse will make it better" with Diana Dors unforgettable as a cackling Nanny from Hell--brilliant stuff, at least as this viewer judges things...
I have never heard of Alternative Three and I suspect a lot of it would go right over my head not having been a regular viewer of British television in my life apart from the polypusses I viewed on such things as Masterpiece Theater, Mystery, and more recently via DVD and U-tube.
cheers, H.
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scarred
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 63
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Post by scarred on May 3, 2017 17:36:36 GMT
Alternative Three was astounding at the time - in fact, it still is damn good - and the only thing that gave it away for me was recognising Shane Rimmer (blimey, that bloke from UFO was really an astronaut??)and also noting that the copyright date was not just a year but April 1st (I wasn't that anal, honest, I was just still riveted to the screen). I think it was supposed to be shown on that date but a technician's strike buggered that one! It's worth picking up the dvd for the discussion between the producer, director and the guy who played the anchorman, which is also fascinating. Look into the afterlife of Alternative Three, it's amazing. There are people out there who think it's a genuine documentary or at the very least a CIA psy-op to cover up the fact that the evacuation of Earth is actually happening. One site I went on stated as a fact that former President Obama was trained on Mars in zero G combat with aliens.Which just makes him cooler in my view.
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Post by helrunar on May 3, 2017 21:42:34 GMT
There are a couple of uploads of Alternative Three on Youtube. In the blurb for this one, it is stated that the program was banned on US television. That does seem a bit odd since back in those days, programming of this type from the UK was never shown on US television. It may have been considered for some kind of PBS magazine program, I suppose. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOycaGEDORMIt does look quite the slice of deliciously po-faced UK 70s weirdness... the drab clothing, domestic interiors and office spaces ("look at this MESS we're supposed to work out of!") alone warrant ethnographic analysis. I learn about all the best stuff here! H.
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Post by rawlinson on May 3, 2017 22:45:56 GMT
One thing I've been doing as a result of the book is tracking down lots of the comics mentioned. The Who annuals and strips in particular have been a treat, as is the Valiant book,
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scarred
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 63
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Post by scarred on May 3, 2017 23:53:46 GMT
One thing I've been doing as a result of the book is tracking down lots of the comics mentioned. The Who annuals and strips in particular have been a treat, as is the Valiant book, I'll pass that along to Ste, he's the comic expert. The Who annuals are great though, aren't they? The first annual I ever owned (and this is before my memory of being a Doctor Who fan begins) was the 1973 annual. Later I saved up the vouchers from Typhoo Tea and got the Doctor Who annual collection which I love to this day
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Post by rawlinson on May 4, 2017 0:02:23 GMT
They're fantastic, yeah. As much as I love Who I'd never really gone back and explored the books. It was only last year I read Combat Rock and Rags for the first time, which are brilliant horror novels, not just Who novels.
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scarred
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 63
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Post by scarred on May 4, 2017 0:16:37 GMT
They're fantastic, yeah. As much as I love Who I'd never really gone back and explored the books. It was only last year I read Combat Rock and Rags for the first time, which are brilliant horror novels, not just Who novels. I enjoyed Rags, I don't remember getting on as well with Combat Rock so maybe that's calling for a re-read.
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scarred
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 63
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Post by scarred on May 5, 2017 8:37:23 GMT
Regarding the 80s book, there are a few things I'd love to see covered. I'm now 39 and still dreadfully haunted by some of the short films they showed on Screen Test in the early 80s. I'd just kill to see some of those again. Also some of the episodes of Children's anthology series Dramarama were the stuff of nightmares - particularly I remember an episode called A Young Person's Guide to Going Backwards in the World which featured a boy forced to enter a large mouth at a fairground, inside which men in white masks walked the wrong way up an escalator. Half of it is on YouTube but not the latter half which is the section that lingers most terribly! Screen Test is definitely in, I know Ste (Brotherstone) is a big fan of that stuff. Dramarama is in too. I'll look in to the episode you mention.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on May 5, 2017 9:53:05 GMT
Stuff got cut, notably my piece on Amicus films was trimmed right back, a whole section on BBC vs ITV was cut, I know that Tomorrow People was originally a much longer piece and a whole article I wrote on Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (which always used to make me cry!) was excised. I'd have to agree with Helrunar that it would be worth having any excised or extended material on a website or blog, as they'd not only help promote the book but would also please those who have already enjoyed the first volume (read it from cover to cover, myself, and it never lost my interest once) and would like even more. This needn't necessarily be your own site, as you could offer the pieces as individual articles to somewhere like We Are Cult with a plug for the book attached.
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Post by cromagnonman on May 5, 2017 10:24:52 GMT
Thanks, Dave! That was great fun. I loved that it opened with the Thames TV signature tune and the now familiar opening music from Tomorrow People (which I only heard for the first time a few years ago via a Trunk Records CD release--then last year, finally saw some of the shows on Youtube), and closed with Barry Gray's fab music for UFO which I really think of as a late 60s artifact. So you and your collaborator wrote 700 pages between the two of you? Impressive! Still haven't caught up with some of the shows you mention, most notably The Sweeney. Wishing you all the best with your next project, Helrunar (Steve) You're welcome. You're correct, of course, about UFO being made in the late 60s but the episodes didn't air over here until, in some regions, as late as 1974 so it was always a staple of my 70s childhood. We did write over 700 pages! I think the limit on Lulu was 740 pages total and we went right to the limit. Stuff got cut, notably my piece on Amicus films was trimmed right back, a whole section on BBC vs ITV was cut, I know that Tomorrow People was originally a much longer piece and a whole article I wrote on Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (which always used to make me cry!) was excised. I would heartily recommend all the shows we mentioned (I'm not sure which stayed in the interview because I don't like the sound of my own voice so I haven't listened to it!), Feathered Serpent is as shocking as Ste suggests, Alternative Three is worth watching for the story which surrounds it which is incredible and I cannot recommend The Sweeney highly enough. Thank you again for your kind wishes. Dave Ah Skippy: I seem to remember Liza Goddard saying something to the effect that the only reason the wallaby bounded up so obligingly on camera was because it was trying to get away from having its tail nailed down out of shot. Ah Liza Goddard: one can't even discuss 60s Australian marsupial tv without invoking the shade of Bergerac. Even the book I'm reading at the moment has suddenly shifted the action from Barbados to The Channel Islands. Its as if this forum is being haunted; Arthur Askey at one extreme and Bergerac at the other. And in between the two LIES MADNESS!!!!!
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Post by rawlinson on May 5, 2017 10:29:26 GMT
That reminds me, the two Bergerac horror episodes from series 4 are really good fun.
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scarred
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 63
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Post by scarred on May 5, 2017 12:57:55 GMT
Stuff got cut, notably my piece on Amicus films was trimmed right back, a whole section on BBC vs ITV was cut, I know that Tomorrow People was originally a much longer piece and a whole article I wrote on Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (which always used to make me cry!) was excised. I'd have to agree with Helrunar that it would be worth having any excised or extended material on a website or blog, as they'd not only help promote the book but would also please those who have already enjoyed the first volume (read it from cover to cover, myself, and it never lost my interest once) and would like even more. This needn't necessarily be your own site, as you could offer the pieces as individual articles to somewhere like We Are Cult with a plug for the book attached. There are plans for a website (I've already purchased the site name) and, hopefully, when I have enough time away from the day job to get that up and running I'll certainly put up stuff that didn't make the cut. Everything I wrote for the book is sitting on my hard drive right now so it would be no problem to do that. Hopefully we can extend the 70s volume with new blog posts as well. In parts of the radio interview, that themselves didn't make the cut, we said that the book could easily have been 1000 pages longer and there were dozens of things we didn't cover that we'd like to take a run at. EDIT: here you go, here's the original working version of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo Skippy
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