E.C. Tubb’s Space: 1999 Rogue Planet (TV tie-in novel)

E.C. Tubb’s Rogue Planet, published in 1977, was the ninth of the Space: 1999 TV tie-in novels. It is an original novel, not a novelisation of episodes from the TV series. It’s based on Year One of the TV series.

E.C. Tubb was a prolific British science fiction writer. He wrote several Space: 1999 novels.

It’s relaxation time for the crew of Moonbase Alpha. They’re enjoying an amateur performance of Hamlet, but when the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears they see and hear something strange, something Shakespeare certainly did not write. It’s a warning that Moonbase Alpha is heading for danger. But every member of the audience saw and heard something different. And every member of the audience agrees that what they saw and heard was terrifying.

Was it some kind of mass delusion? Was it some mysterious message beamed from somewhere in space? Not long afterwards some kind of temporary collective madness afflicts the Alphans. It passes, but again it was terrifying and inexplicable.

Moonbase Alpha’s commander, John Koenig, wants answers. The base’s chief scientist Victor Bergman and chief medical officer Dr Helena Russell cannot provide answers, only speculation. Alpha’s instruments can detect nothing threatening.

Then the brain appears. It can’t be a brain of course, but it looks like one. An enormous brain the size of a planet. And Moonbase Alpha is trapped in a separate miniature universe. There appears to be no escape but some means of escape must be found. One crew member has already died of old age and he was only thirty-two. The same fate may await all of the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha.

Space: 1999 was a great series (or at least Year One was great) but you do have to accept the outrageous premise of the series - the Moon being thrown out of orbit and hurtling through space at an absurd speed like a gigantic spaceship. You also have to accept the idea that in the almost unimaginable vastness and emptiness of space they keep encountering countless planets and alien spacecraft. But then the science fiction genre as a whole requires a huge suspension of disbelief. If you love science fiction you learn to accept some wacky science.

The novel captures the feel of the series extremely well. The principal characters - Commander Koenig, Dr Russell, Professor Bergman, chief Eagle pilot Alan Carter etc - behave the way they behave in the TV series. There’s the same mix of space adventure and reasonably cool science fiction concepts.

There’s a reasonable amount of emphasis on Koenig’s responsibilities as commander and the need to be strong and decisive while always bearing in mind that he’s dealing with people not machines. Similarly with Dr Russell there’s emphasis on the awesome responsibilities she has to shoulder alone.

Tubb’s prose is straightforward but pleasing enough.

It’s a very entertaining story with a few serious touches. The crew of Moonbase Alpha have to confront the imminent threats of death (death from accelerated ageing which is certainly a very frightening prospect) and madness. Death is ever-present in this story, in varying forms.

Space: 1999 was not a series that offered spectacular space battles. It offered action, but the action was more likely to be battles against strange unseen alien forces rather than hostile star fleets. This novel follows the same sort of formula. There are narrow escapes from mortal danger but the dangers in this case come from strange force fields and from being trapped in caverns and suchlike things.

This novel also offers us an alien life form that is genuinely alien.

Rogue Planet is a very decent science fiction novel. If you’re a fan of the TV series you’ll enjoy and even if you’ve never seen the series you’ll probably find it entertaining. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed one of Tubb’s other Space: 1999 novels, Alien Seed (which is excellent). I’ve also reviewed another Space: 1999 novel, John Rankine’s Android Planet (which is quite good).

Man from Atlantis (TV-movie, 1977)

Man from Atlantis started life as a series of four made-for-TV movies in 1977. They were quite successful and NBC gave the go-ahead for a weekly series which lasted just 13 episodes. I haven’t seen the series but the consensus seems to be that it was nowhere near as good as the TV-movies.

Patrick Duffy starred. He would soon go on to major stardom in Dallas.

The premise is rather silly, but then if you start worrying about the silliness of the premises of science fiction movies and TV series you’ll pretty much have to give up on the genre altogether. I figures that if I can accept impossibilities like faster-than-light travel then I can accept a water-breathing man.

The man (later given the name Mark Harris) is found washed up on a beach. He is taken to hospital but all attempts to resuscitate him seem doomed to failure. Then Dr Elizabeth Merrill figures out the problem. This man breathes water! She insists that he should be thrown back in the ocean, whereupon he immediately revives.

But where does a water-breathing man come from? The Navy’s super-computer has the answer. He must be from Atlantis.

The Navy sees possibilities in this young man, as a weapon. Dr Merrill doesn’t want him used in that way. Mark is also not interested in being used in this way. Mark is eventually persuaded to carry out one mission. The Navy has lost a super-secret deep-sea research submarine. It’s lying at the bottom of the sea, 35,000 feet down. That’s no problem for Mark.

What Mark finds at the bottom of the sea is not what he expected. He finds himself a prisoner of sorts. And mixed up in a terrifying plan for world domination.

It was clearly intended from the start to make this a series of TV-movies so, quite sensibly, lots of questions are left unanswered. They did after all want people to watch the next movie in the hope of getting those answers.

Mark, very conveniently, has amnesia. He has no idea of his own origins. All he knows is that the sea is his home and that he understands the language of whales. Maybe he is an Altantean. If so, does Atlantis still exist? Is he the last surviving Atlantean? Where was Atlantis? Was it really a fabulously ancient highly advanced civilisation? We don’t know and Mark doesn’t know.

He is suspicious of the US Government (this was 1977 so it’s the era of 70s paranoia) but we’re left unsure what plans the Government has for Mark. Those plans might well be somewhat sinister.

His relationship with Dr Merrill remains unclear. She has obviously developed an emotional attachment to him but whether it’s a kind of displaced maternal affection or whether there’s a romantic elements to it, and possibly a physical attraction, is uncertain. Mark may have developed an attachment to her but that is less clear.

All of this offers potential for further development, which is a sound storytelling strategy in this context.

There’s an over-the-top mad scientist/diabolical criminal mastermind involved, which is always a good thing.

Visually it’s reasonably impressive for a TV production.

There’s some action but it probably needed a bit more and it definitely needed a bit more zing.

The biggest weakness is that there are not enough exciting underwater action scenes. Such scenes are pretty much an essential ingredient for such a series. What they really needed to do was to get hold of someone like John Lamb, the man who did the underwater photography for Sea Hunt and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Lamb knew how to do that sort of stuff and make it look good on a tight television budget. As it stands the underwater sequences are OK but just a little disappointing.

The action climax also needed to be a bit more spectacular but there was of course a limit to what you could do on a 1970s TV budget.

Patrick Duffy is OK. He’s supposed to be a kind of alien so his slightly detached performance works well enough. Belinda J. Montgomery as Dr Merrill is an adequate female lead and does the idealistic doctor thing convincingly. Victor Buono makes a fine mad scientist.

The four original TV-movies have been released on DVD in the Warner Archive series and they look quite acceptable. The TV series has also had a DVD release. I believe the first TV-movie is also available on Blu-Ray.

Man from Atlantis isn’t great but it’s fairly entertaining and just interesting enough that I’ll probably watch the second TV-movie.

The Professionals season 3 (1979)

The mid-70s witnessed a revolution in British television. It started with seasons three and four of Special Branch but the series most associated with this revolution was The Sweeney. Shooting on video in the studio was out. Everything had to be shot on location, on 35mm film. The emphasis henceforward was on action, which usually meant violent action. Brian Clemens was not unaware of this trend and had taken his first tentative steps in this new direction with The New Avengers. For his next project Clemens decided to go all-out. He would out-Sweeney The Sweeney. That new project would become The Professionals.

The Professionals certainly attracted attention. And outrage. It wasn’t just the violence. It’s a series about a British counter-terrorist counter-espionage squad, CI5, that quite openly flouts the law.

The Professionals was made in five separate production blocks between 1977 and 1983 and screened as five seasons over the same period, but the production blocks and the seasons do not coincide at all. There was no attempt to screen the episodes in the order in which they were made. The 1979 third season is a mixture of episodes from the second and third production blocks.

The cast remained unchanged from season two - Gordon Jackson as CIA chief George Cowley with Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw as Bodie and Doyle, his two top agents. The characterisations haven’t changed either. Cowley is as ruthless as ever with a fine disregard for everything except getting the job done. Ex-mercenary Bodie is pretty much an ice-cold killer, although with a sense of humour. Doyle is equally tough but more sensitive, and is the only one of the trio with what you might call a fully developed conscience.

The stories haven’t changed a great deal either. CI5 battles spies and international criminals but their main focus is combating terrorism.

There’s enough action and mayhem to ensure that the viewer will overlook any deficiencies in the scripts. And for the most part the scripts are solid and tight.

The Professionals was intended as pure high-octane entertainment so don’t expect any philosophical musing or too much in the way of subtlety. On occasions the series does confront ethical issues but this is not Callan, or even Danger Man. If you’re looking for a series that offers provocative intellectual insights into the morality of espionage this is not that series. The Professionals offers car chases, gun battles and explosions.

But the action is handled with style and energy.

Episode Guide

The Purging of CI5 was a logical enough choice for a season opener, with lots of action, lots of explosions and lots of excitement. Someone is trying to destroy CI5. Their plan seems to be to kill every last CI5 agent, including Cowley. And they seem quite capable of doing so.

This episode is quite reminiscent of the excellent 1969 Callan episode Let's Kill Everybody. In fact the premise is more or less identical. It’s not a bad episode.

In Backtrack CI5 have to stop an arms smuggling operation. They have a witness who might be useful, if they can keep him alive. They have to follow the trail of evidence back to a burglary. That burglar found something crucial. Bodie and Dole have to try out their own skills as burglars.

A typical but very entertaining episode with Cowley being particularly ruthless.

Stopover starts with a British agent who has just escaped from the Khmer Rough. He has some interesting information about a high-level defector. Of course there are twists. A solid enough plot.

In this episode there’s plenty of focus on the tense relationship between Cowley on the one hand and Bodie and Doyle on the other. They feel that Cowley is concealing vital information from them, forcing them to work in the dark. And they’re right. And they resent it, understandably. One of the best episodes of the season.

Dead Reckoning starts with an exchange of agents by the British and the Bulgarians. The British got double-agent Stefan Batak as their part of the deal. The arrangement was that the deal was to be kept secret. There is a complication - Batak’s daughter Anna who lives in London. She was all set to go to Bulgaria to visit her father in prison.

There are the usual betrayals and counter-betrayals and complex plot twists. Cowley is getting plenty of information out of Batak. He thinks the information is accurate, but he still isn’t certain. And then disaster strikes. Could Anna be an assassin? Or is she an innocent pawn?

Doyle takes some film and somebody is very keen to take it away from him. The trouble is that the film doesn’t show anything that could possibly be useful.

A nicely cynical twisted spy thriller plot. A very good episode.

The Madness of Mickey Hamilton starts with an attempted political assassination but the viewer already has reason to suspect that something else is going on. CI5 however are sure it was an attempt to kill an African diplomat. If they’d realised earlier that were barking up the wrong tree disaster might have been averted, but that the theme of this episode - by the time anyone realises there’s a problem it’s too late.

A good episode with Doyle showing an unexpected touch of compassion. To everybody else the villain in this story is just a villain, but to Doyle’s he’s a victim.

A Hiding to Nothing involves the possibility of an assassination attempt on an Arab leader. And CI5 has a leak. There are lots of twists to come.

Again we see a subtle difference between Bodie and Doyle, with Doyle being just as tough but with more of a human side. Excellent episode.

In Runner a gun shop is robbed. Robbed of a variety of very nasty weaponry. CI5 assume it’s the prelude to a major campaign of violence, a campaign of political violence by an outfit referred to as the Organisation (presumably some offshoot of the IRA).

CI5 are being manipulated and Doyle is being manipulated. The Organisation is being manipulated. There’s a dangerous game being played, and the motivations are not clear. CI5 have to find out what those motivations are. They have a number of sources of possible information but those sources are not exactly friendly. A solid episode with a fiendishly complicated plot. Maybe too complicated. You’ll have to concentrate.

In the season finale Servant of Two Masters Bodie and Doyle have to investigate a possible traitor - George Cowley. This is by far the weakest episode of the season. You have to take seriously the idea that Cowley might be corrupt, and I don’t believe that a single viewer would have bought that for a second. If you don’t buy it the story becomes boringly predictable.

Final Thoughts

Overall a strong season with the season finale being the only dud episode. Other than that there’s plenty of excitement and mindless violence. Highly recommended.

Thriller - three 1973 epidodes

A look at three episodes from Brian Clemens’ horror anthology series Thriller, one of the finest series of its type ever made. All three episodes originally aired in 1973.

The Colour of Blood

The Colour of Blood is the fifth episode of the first season of Thriller. Brian Clemens wrote the script, Robert Tronson directed.

The Carnation Killer, a crazed sex murderer who has killed at least nine women, has been caught. He has been found guilty but insane and he is now on his way to a hospital for the criminally insane. Everyone can breathe a sigh of relief.

Unfortunately Arthur Page (for that is the Carnation Killer’s real name) never reaches the hospital. The prison van crashes and Page escapes.

Page hopes to lose himself in the crowds at Waterloo Station. But first he must have a red carnation for his button hole. He simply doesn’t feel dressed without it.

He is rather surprised when a young blonde woman carrying an attache case suddenly latches onto him. As luck (in this case bad luck) would have it Julie Marsh is waiting to meet a man she has never set eyes on.

A man named Graham has inherited a large sum of money and a house in the country. Julie’s job is to meet Graham at Waterloo Station, hand over the money and then take him by train to Westerling (the house he has inherited). Julie will recognise Graham by the red carnation in his button-hole.

It’s just very bad luck for Julie that the first man she sees with a red carnation is not Mr Graham, it’s Arthur Page the insane sex murderer. Page might be insane but he can also be very charming and appear very normal, and Julie has no idea that she’s chosen the wrong man and that she’s about to take him out into the country to a very isolated house where she’s going to be quite alone with him.

But there are some major plot twists that are about to kick in and take the story in a rather different direction. There are nasty surprises in store for just about everyone.

Norman Eshley’s chilling performance as Page is what stands out most in this episode. It’s a neat little script, which relies a little on coincidence but the coincidences are entirely plausible. There’s some effective suspense and some creepy moments. All in all an excellent episode.

Murder in Mind

Murder in Mind was scripted by Terence Feely from a story by Brian Clemens. It was directed by Alan Gibson and was broadcast in May 1973.

It starts with a murder that isn’t.

Tom Patterson (Donald Gee) has held the very humble rank of Detective-Constable for all of a week. Like any keen young copper he dreams of solving a major case. And then a major case seems to drop into his lap. A woman wanders into the police station in the middle of the night and confesses to a murder. Since he’s the only detective on duty it’s Tom Patterson’s case.

But it ends disappointingly. Betty Drew (Zena Walker) had had a blow on the head and her confession was all nonsense.

There’s something about the case that keeps niggling at Tom Patterson. He’s not sure what it is but he feels that there’s some connection he should have made but he didn’t and nobody else did either. There wasn’t any murder and it was all Betty Drew’s imagination and it would be better for Tom to forget all about it. But Tom still feels that there is a puzzle here somewhere.

Brian Clemens has come up with a very intricate script this time. There’s a perfectly straightforward explanation for what has happened, the straightforward explanation being that Betty was concussed and confused and imagined a murder that never happened. Everybody accepts the straightforward explanation, apart from Tom. And of course the viewer is likely to agree with Tom - that there is an alternative explanation. But it requires the pieces of the jigsaw to be pieced together in a different way. The alternative explanation is convoluted but it’s clever and it’s plausible.

But if Tom is right then there might be a murder after all.

The acting is solid but for me the highlight is Ronald Radd’s performance as Superintendent Terson. Good episode.

A Place to Die

A Place to Die was scripted by Terence Feely from a story by Brian Clemens. It was directed by Peter Jefferies and went to air in May 1973.


It’s a basic story that has been done countless times and i’s an idea that was very popular at the time - a remote community that seems perfectly normal but in fact follows either paganism or satanism. To be fair, in 1973 the idea was still reasonably fresh.

It’s also another story of innocent city folk who foolishly move to a rural area only to find themselves in a nightmare world of primitive superstition and terror.

Dr Bruce Nelson (Bryan Marshall) has just taken over a practice in a small village. He and his American wife Tessa (Alexandra Hay) are looking forward to getting away from the stresses of city life.

The first sign that something odd is going on comes when they meet their seriously weird housekeeper Beth. Beth reacts with wonder when she sees Tessa. She excitedly informs the other villagers that Tessa is moon-pale and moon-gold and limps with her left leg. The villagers know what that means. Tessa is the Expected One. And it’s almost Lady Day, and this year Lady Day coincides with a full moon. The signs are clear.

What is going on is obvious to the viewer very early on, we know what Bruce and Tessa have wandered into, but they have no idea. That of course sets up the suspense very nicely. The viewer doesn’t know how Bruce and Tessa are going to get out of a terrifying situation. Another fine episode.

Final Thoughts

Three more very solid Thriller episodes. All worth watching.

Nigel Kneale's Beasts (1976)

Beasts is a six-part 1976 British horror anthology TV series made by ATV and created and written by Nigel Kneale. Kneale is best known for his 1950s Quatermass sci-fi/horror TV serials which were later adapted to film by Hammer, with great success although Kneale wasn’t happy with the Hammer versions. Kneale later wrote some very strange, disturbing but fascinating TV plays such as The Year of the Sex Olympics and The Stone Tape (both of which I highly recommend).

Kneale had a knack for mixing horror with science fiction in a genuinely original and surprising manner.

Beasts is typical of Kneale's work in that you’re never quite sure if there’s a supernatural element of if the stories are science fiction. Or they might possibly be merely the products of overheated imaginations.

The episodes

Baby is an exercise in folk horror. Peter Gilkes (Simon MacCorkindale) and his wife Jo (Jane Wymark) have just moved to the country. Peter was tired of being a city vet. He wanted to be a real country vet. Jo is a country girl but oddly she seems less happy about the movie. Maybe she’ll feel better when their very rundown cottage is fixed up a bit. Jo is pregnant and she’s anxious since she had a miscarriage a year earlier. Jo’s anxiety will play an important part in the story.

While tearing down a wall Peter and Jo find a huge earthenware jar. It contains a mummified - something. Peter is a vet but he has no idea what it is, although he finds it fascinating. Jo is totally creeped out by it.

Jo hears all sorts of tales, some of which may be true and some of which may be folklore. The tales concern the piece of land on which the cottage stands, and the reason nobody farms this land. She also discovers an interesting fact about the previous tenants. They had no children. This seems significant to Jo.

Jo hears strange noises and sees a few things that disturb her. Her anxiety grows. Nobody takes her fears seriously. The viewer will also wonder just how seriously to take her fears. Most of the things she sees and hears could be described as ambiguous. To find out whether Jo’s fears really are justified you’ll have to watch the episode. Good episode.

Buddyboy is wildly original and quirky. Dave (Martin Shaw) is thinking of buying a broken-down dolphinarium. Not for the dolphins. The dolphins are long gone. Dave wants to turn the place into a cinema to show adult films. That’s the business Dave is in. He already owns an adult cinema. Converting this place into a cinema will be easy because a cinema is what it originally was, before it was turned into a dolphinarium.

The guy selling the place, Hubbard (Wolfe Morris), seems extraordinarily jumpy and anxious to sell. He keeps talking about all the trouble he had with Buddyboy, his star dolphin. Buddyboy was a great performer but difficult to handle.

There’s a strange girl, Lucy (Pamela Moiseiwitsch) who is always hanging around the dolphinarium. She’s obsessed with Buddyboy as well. She thought he was the most wonderful animal that ever lived.

Dave is strangely drawn to the odd waif-like Lucy and they gradually become involved. Then there’s the ending (and I have no intention of revealing any spoilers here) which exasperates a lot of people. They feel cheated because there is no obvious supernatural element and they resort to prosaic interpretations which I feel are probably wrong.

My feeling is that Kneale really wants us to think about this one. There are plausible and satisfying explanations but you have to tease them out and you have to think about what you’ve seen and you have to think about both Lucy and Buddyboy. It’s not that there’s no strangeness here, but it’s not the obvious strangeness people expect from straightforward horror. This episode made me think long and hard about what it could mean, and I think that actually makes it great television.

The Dummy is another indication of the unconventionality of Kneale’s approach. Clyde Boyd (Bernard Horsfall) is an actor falling apart. His last chance is to play the monster known as the Dummy in yet another low-budget horror flick. The trouble really starts when he spots Peter Wager (Simon Oates) in the studio. Wager is the man who stole Boyd’s wife. Boyd falls apart completely but this shooting has to go ahead and harassed producer 'Bunny' Nettleton (Clive Swift) manages to convince Boyd to complete the scene. The result is mayhem, the police have to be called, there’s a dead man lying on the studio floor and Wager is running around with a shotgun threatening to shoot Boyd.

The clue to what has happened is provided by journalist Joan Eastgate (Lillias Walker) who is on set hoping to interview Boyd. She talks about tribesmen who wear masks in religious ceremonies and how it’s the mask that ends up wearing the man rather than the other way around. That’s more or less what happens here. Boyd’s whole personality disintegrates and he becomes the monster, the Dummy. It’s not just his money problems and his wife leaving him, he also has to face the failure of his career as an actor. The only successful roles he’s ever had having been playing the Dummy, playing the entire part encased in a rubber suit. The Dummy is more real than he is.

It’s great to see Clive Swift in a complex ambiguous part and doing it extremely well. Thorley Walters adds fun as the pompous but rather ridiculous Shakepearian actor turning up for a day’s work and a pay cheque.

This is a serious and tragic story. Don’t be misled by the silliness of the monster costume. That was probably a swipe by Nigel Kneale at Doctor Who, a TV series he despised.

Special Offer is a horror story set in a small supermarket. Noreen (Pauline Quirke) is a socially awkward clumsy teenager who seems to make a mess of everything she does, whether it’s packing shelves or working the checkouts. Accidents seem to happen around her. The story manager, the slimy Mr Grimley (Geoffrey Bateman), is exasperated with her. Even worse, Noreen has a crush on him, while Grimley is pursuing the other checkout operator, glamorous dolly bird Linda. Noreen claims it’s an animal causing all the trouble. A small furry animal that looks quite a bit like the company’s cartoon mascot, Briteway Billy.

Nobody believes her but then things start happening that can’t be blamed on her, and the other staff members can hear a small animal scuttling about in the store. Mr Grimley is out of his depth and calls on the grocery chain’s personnel manager, Mr Liversedge (Wensley Pithey), for help. Mr Liversedge thinks they’re dealing with something akin to a poltergeist although in this case it’s more a paranormal than a supernatural phenomenon. He thinks Noreen is unconsciously making these things happen.

This episode starts out rather whimsically although with an edge of pathos. Very gradually the mood shifts to become more menacing. The terror when it comes is still mixed with whimsy which gives the story an interesting flavour. I like the idea of a small supermarket as a setting for horror, with tins of baked beans and boxes of cereal used as engines of destruction. And of course Mr Liversedge’s theory is that the terror’s starting point is Noreen’s hopeless love for Mr Grimley. 17-year-old Pauline Quirke’s performance is extraordinarily good, subtle but emotionally powerful. Quite a good episode.

What Big Eyes begins with a young over-keen RSPCA inspector becoming convinced that an animal trader is up to something shady. He finds it hard to believe that three timber wolves would really have ended up in a tiny pet shop. He discovers that the pet shop’s owner, an elderly eccentric would-be scientist named Leo Raymount (Patrick Magee), really did obtain those wolves. But why? The answer has to do with Raymount’s bizarre theories about lycanthropy. Weird but oddly moving episode.

In During Barty's Party a middle-aged woman is worried that there may be a rat in the cellar. Possibly two rats. Her husband isn’t too worried at first - his wife is rather nervous. Then it becomes obvious that there are more than two rats. A lot more. His wife is even more worried. She thinks these rats are not just ordinary rats. She thinks they have evolved much greater intelligence.

This is a standard “what if nature turned against us” story, although it’s well executed. This is the least weird episode and for that reason I find it the least interesting.

Final Thoughts

Beasts is Kneale pushing the boundaries of the genre and giving us monster stories that defy all our expectations about monster stories. A strange offbeat unsettling series. Highly recommended.

Beasts is available on DVD from Network.

Thriller - Brian Clemens’ favourite episodes

I’ve finally made my way to the end of the 1970s British Brian Clemens anthology series Thriller. It’s taken me eight years to watch all 43 episodes. That might sound a bit ominous. It might suggest that I’m not a big fan of this series. Nothing could be further from the truth. I adored this series when I first saw it many years ago and I adored rewatching it. I’ve watched it slowly because I like to do that with anthology series, especially ones of which I’m particularly fond. I just like to return to them every now and then when I feel the need for reliable spooky entertainment.

And given that each episode is feature length and of course completely standalone it’s a perfectly feasible way to approach such a series.

Having reached the end I’ve decided to revisit the five episodes of which Clemens himself was most proud. Since I haven’t seen these particular episodes for seven or eight years that also seems to me to be a feasible idea.

Thriller occasionally dabbled in the supernatural. It did this very seldom, but it did do it occasionally. Which was actually a rather clever move on Clemens’ part - when you watch a Thriller episode you might be confident that everything will have a rational explanation but you can never discount the possibility that Clemens might unexpectedly throw something supernatural at you.

Someone at the Top of the Stairs

Someone at the Top of the Stairs was the third episode of the first season.

Chrissie Morton (Donna Mills) and Gillian Pemberton (Judy Carne) are two broke art students in London. They think they’ve had a fabulous stroke of good fortune when they find a room in a charming old Victorian rooming house. The rent is ridiculously cheap.

The rooming house of course turns out to be a nightmare.

At first it’s just very subtle creepy things. Odd sounds. One of Chrissie’s bras disappears. The other guests seem to laugh at inappropriate things. Various little things just don’t seem quite right. Then Chrissie discovers the peephole in the bathroom.

Chrissie’s unease grows, as does her frustration that Gillian refuses to take her fears seriously. She does find a boyfriend, Gary, but he doesn’t take her fears seriously either.

The viewer knows that there’s definitely something wrong in this house but we don’t really know much more than the two girls know. Like Chrissie we just slowly grow more uneasy.

Director John Sichel handles things carefully. He avoids anything too obvious. He’s content to let the creepiness develop through hints and through the accumulation of very trivial things, things that taken in isolation would not even be disturbing but they become unsettling when taken together.

Clemens of course wrote the script and it’s a fine effort which builds to a satisfying payoff. It’s satisfying because at the end we have to admit that this really is what all those hints have been pointing towards.

The two lead actresses, Donna Mills and Judy Carne, are effective because they really do come across as two very ordinary girls. Chrissie is the one who gets worried but she’s not hysterical. She’s reacting in a perfectly understandable way. She sees a pattern of little things adding up to something that might be sinister. Gillian’s scepticism is equally plausible. That same pattern of little things seems to her to be very unlikely to be anything to get worried over. They’re not showy performances but they work.

Someone at the Top of the Stairs is pretty effective stuff. Highly recommended.

An Echo of Theresa

An Echo of Theresa is the fourth episode of the first season. American businessman Brad Hunter (Paul Burke) has taken his wife Suzy (Polly Bergen) to London for a second honeymoon. It’s a business trip as well - an English businessman named Trasker wants to negotiate an important deal with him.

Brad starts doing strange things. He calls Suzy Theresa by mistake, and then claims that he’s never met anyone called Theresa. Although he’s never been to London he insists that a cabbie take him to an obscure street to find an old red-brick block of flats. That building was demolished years earlier - how could he possibly know it even existed? He becomes agitated an aggressive. He writes “I love Theresa” on a postcard.

Hardly surprisingly Suzy insists that he sees a psychiatrist pronto.

The psychiatrist discovers that there are two things Brad is sure of. Firstly, that he knows Theresa. Secondly, that he has never met Theresa. He knows her from Vienna, but he has never been to Vienna, in fact he has never been to Europe.

Suzy has a friend at the American Embassy who suggests that this might be a case for Matthew Earp (Dinsdale Landen) . Matthew Earp is a private detective. He claims to be not just a very good a private detective but a magnificent one and he charges accordingly for his services. And he really is as good as he thinks he is.

There are those who find this episode confusing. I have no idea why. Most of what is going on is perfectly obvious very early on. There’s simply no other plausible explanation and there are abundant and very obvious clues. Of course we still don’t know exactly how such an outlandish situation arose and we don’t know how it’s going to be resolved but we know enough for the story to lose much of its punch.

It’s played out rather oddly. Paul Burke and Polly Bergen play it very straight (and Paul Burke is very effective as a man caught in a bewildering situation) while the other main characters are more off-the-wall and seem like they would have been more at home in a different story. And Dinsdale Landen plays Matthew Earp with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Ultimately it’s Dinsdale Landen’s gloriously over-ripe performance that makes this one worth watching.

An Echo of Theresa is interesting and at times very clever, but it’s not a complete success.

One Deadly Owner

One Deadly Owner was the fourth episode of the second season. It went to air in February 1974.

Fashion model Helen Cook (Donna Mills) buts herself a new car - a Rolls-Royce. It has only had one careful owner. Her boyfriend Peter (Jeremy Brett) thinks the car is a foolish extravagance. The odd things is that Helen feel that it rather than her choosing the car, it chose her.

The car seems to have a mind of its own. It takes her places she doesn’t want to go. And then she finds the ear-ring in the boot. She tracks down the previous owner, a very rich man named Jacey (Laurence Payne). She’s sure the ear-ring belonged to Jacey’s wife. His wife left him a few months earlier. Helen becomes convinced that there’s some mystery involving the wife and she feels compelled to solve the mystery.

Most of the things that happen early on are not really frightening or even particularly disturbing - they’re just puzzling. It’s almost as if Helen is being led on. Led on by the car.

Now I know what you’re thinking - that this haunted car story sounds a bit like John Carpenter’s Christine, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. But Brian Clemens came up with the idea of a possessed car almost a decade before King. And they are two quite different stories.

In this outing we know from the start that there’s something vaguely supernatural (or paranormal) going on. We also know that a crime has been committed, and there are multiple plausible suspects. It’s both a haunted car story and a whodunit and it works equally well both ways.

One of this episode’s major assets is that Donna Mills and Jeremy Brett work so well together. Their relationship is convincing and both give fine performances.

The fact that it’s a rather low-key story works in its favour. We’re slowly drawn in, just the way Helen Cook is slowly drawn in.

This is an extremely good episode.

A Coffin for the Bride

A Coffin for the Bride opened the third season. We know what is going on right from the start. A ex-merchant seaman (played by Michael Jayston) marries rich middle-aged women and then drowns them in the bathtub (after they have made wills in his favour of course). The murders are successfully passed off as accidents but a lawyer named Mason (Michael Gwynn) is convinced that murder is indeed what they were. Mason is just a very ordinary solicitor but he’s intelligent and once he gets an idea into his head he pursues it grimly. And he does not intend to forget this particular murderer.

The killer, calling himself Mark Walker, has now found himself in a very curious position. He has fallen for a woman. Really fallen for her. A young pretty woman named Stella (Helen Mirren). This time he really wants the woman, and not for the purposes of murder or profit.

But of course he still has a living to make, and murder is his business. He already has his next victim picked out, a rich widow named Angela. I can’t tell you any more without risking spoilers.

The twist ending is outlandish but justly celebrated - there are hints earlier on and when the big reveal comes you realise that of course that had to be the explanation. Which is of course the hallmark of good writing.

It’s not just the ending that makes this one notable. The performances by Helen Mirren and Michael Gwynn are superb but it’s Michael Jayston who really impresses. Mark Walker is a monster but he has odd vulnerabilities. They certainly don’t justify his actions but they do suggest that there are things in his past that have made him into a monster.

Arthur English is a delight as the friendly barman Freddy.

A bravura effort from scriptwriter Clemens and from a fine cast make this deservedly one of the most fondly remembered episodes of the entire series.

I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill

I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill is the second episode of season three. This is a pure suspense episode - we know the killer’s identity right from the start. But the police don’t know. They think they do, but they don’t.

It starts with the murder of a woman. Then there’s a second murder. They’re clearly the work of a serial killer. Ann Rogers, an American working in London, saw the killer. Unfortunately she can’t identify him from the police mug shots file.

She does however fall for Mark (Tony Selby), the Detective-Sergeant in charge of the case, and Mark falls for her. A few weeks later she sees the killer in the street, she recognises him and he recognises her. She realises immediately that he’s going to try to kill her. She returns to her office and as usual she has to work late. There’s nobody else in the building, apart from the security guard. But the killer is inside the building. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game which occupies the whole of the second half of the episode. 

To makes things even more exciting the killer has locked the building so there seems to be no escape for Ann.

Robert Lang plays the killer and he’s a wonderful choice. He’s just one of those scary sinister-looking actors. Julie Sommars is very good as Ann - she’s convincingly terrified but she’s also quick-witted.

A deserted office building proves to be a fine setting for such a suspense story. Everything looks so harmless, except that there’s a psycho running loose.

The tension builds up and up and when you think it’s all over, it isn’t.

This is an effective Brian Clemens script and it’s perfectly executed by director Shaun O’Riordan.

This is a classic woman-in-peril story which works beautifully.

Final Thoughts

I’m not totally sold on An Echo of Theresa but the other four Brian Clemens favourites can certainly be very highly recommended.

The Bionic Woman season one (1976)

The Six Million Dollar Man had been a big success so when writer Kenneth Johnson came up with a story idea for an episode featuring a bionic woman the producers were enthusiastic. After all if a bionic man was super-cool then a bionic woman would be totally awesome. And so the bionic woman, Jaime Sommers, was launched on the small screen with a two-part Six Million Dollar Man episode. The original intention was that this would be a one-off appearance but it didn’t take long to figure out that featuring her in a spin-off series would be an even better idea.

Now there’s one thing I have to say upfront. It’s impossible to discuss The Bionic Woman without discussing the episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man which introduced the character and which preceded The Bionic Woman series. And it’s impossible to say anything about those episodes without revealing some spoilers for those episodes. It probably doesn’t really matter because anyone interested in either series is almost certainly already aware of certain events that happen during those episodes. The very existence of The Bionic Woman series is in some ways a spoiler for those episodes.

But if you’ve never seen those two early two-part episodes and you’re really spoiler-phobic you might want to skip the next section and jump ahead to the episode guide for The Bionic Woman.

The early crossover episodes

Jaime made her first appearance in a two-part episode called The Bionic Woman (written by Kenneth Johnson) which went to air during the second season, in March 1975.

The Bionic Woman

Steve decides he wants to buy a ranch in his home town as a way of getting back to his roots, and to have a refuge from the craziness of his life as a secret agent. It just so happens that this small town has produced two celebrities - Steve Austin the astronaut (obviously) and Jaime Sommers, a rising star on the women’s professional tennis circuit. Steve and Jaime were high school sweethearts years earlier but they both had ambitions that made marriage seem impractical. But Steve soon discovers that he’s still in love with Jaime.

Their newly rekindled romance is just starting to blossom when Jaime has a terrible sky-diving accident. She’s dying but Steve knows that there’s a way to save her - all he has to do is persuade Oscar Goldman that the government really needs a bionic woman. And all Oscar Goldman has to do is persuade the US Government to shell out another six million dollars to rebuild Jaime.

The first instalment of this two-parter takes a long time to get going. There is perhaps too much time spent on the Steve-Jaime romance, and way too much time spent on Steve’s parents doing folksy things. The extended treatment of the romance was I guess necessary in order to make it plausible that Steve would do anything, absolutely anything, to save Jaime.

The transformation of Jaime into the bionic woman is also pretty much travelling ground that was already travelled in the first of the Six Million Dollar Man TV movies. On the other hand Lindsay Wagner is cute and likeable and she and Lee Majors do have some genuine chemistry.

The producers didn’t want Jaime to be an exact clone of Steve Austin so instead of a bionic eye she has a bionic ear.

There is a spy plot mixed in here somewhere but the main focus is very much on the Steve-Jaime love story. It’s not the sort of thing that you would have expected the Six Million Dollar Man target audience to have gone for but in fact the viewers loved it.

This is a very emotion-heavy episode with an ending that was not only daring for network TV in the mid-70s but turned out to be rather rash. The ending does pack a punch.

The Return of The Bionic Woman

The Return of The Bionic Woman was screened during the third season of The Six Million Dollar Man in September 1975.

This episode also introduces the third actor to play the rôle of Dr Rudy Wells, the medical genius responsible for Steve’s bionics.

Steve is badly injured on a mission involving a gangland war. He is rushed to the hospital in which Dr Rudy Wells does his bionic surgery. Steve is only semi-conscious but he is sure he sees Jaime in an adjoining room. But that can’t be. It can’t be her. Oscar assures him that he was delirious. Then he sees her again. Oscar has a lot of explaining to do. There’s also a lot of explaining to do to the audience but writer Kenneth Johnson comes up with an explanation that doesn’t stretch credibility too far (given that this is a science fiction series).

Jaime is alive but not she’s not exactly well. She has lost all her memories. She has no idea who Steve is. Which is a bit of a blow, considering that they were engaged to be married. Steve has other blows to deal with, such as Jaime falling in love with the young genius doctor who saved her.

So, like the earlier two-parter, this is going to be another very emotion-driven episode. It has to be emphasised just how bold a move it was in the mid-70s to have two two-part episodes of an action-adventure-science fiction series devoted almost entirely to romance plots.

It was also quite an acting challenge for Lindsay Wagner. She has to play Jaime as Jaime, but as a slightly different Jaime. Without her memories she is just a little bit child-like and innocent. The whole world is new to her. She has to rediscover the world, and she has to face the most complicated human challenge imaginable - she has to start her emotional life all over again.

The Bionic Woman Episode Guide

The Bionic Woman series kicks off with Welcome Home, Jaime and it’s another daring move - beginning an action/adventure series with a two-part episode focused almost entirely on emotional drama. This was just not done on network TV in 1976. In fact the whole “how Jaime Sommers became the bionic woman and it affected her emotionally” tale is a six-episode story arc (beginning with four episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man) and that was most certainly not done at that time. Kenneth Johnson (who wrote all six episodes and created The Bionic Woman) was years ahead of his time. Whether you think multi-episode story arcs are a good thing or a bad thing is another matter (I think that on the whole they’re a bad idea).

Jaime has had yet another operation, the hope being to regenerate some of her brain cells so that she can get her memory back. It works, up to a point. She now remembers a lot more. But she still doesn’t remember being engaged to marry Steve Austin. She is however about to find out.

In the second part we finally start to see Jaime doing some serious secret agent stuff, and showing off her bionic abilities. The big difference between Steve Austin and Jaime is that she has a bionic ear instead of a bionic eye and his story makes plenty of use of that bionic ear. It’s what keeps her one step ahead of the bad guys.

This two-parter is still basically part of the introductory story arc, giving us Jaime’s backstory and establishing her character and also establishing the vital fact that much of her past has been lost to her. She’s not just going to be battling bad guys but presumably also trying to re-establish her own identity.

So in some ways you could argue that the first season proper started with episode three by which time the format of the show had been more or less finalised.

There’s a definite Clark Kent vibe to the series - on the surface Jaime is a mild-mannered bubbly pretty young schoolteacher but she has a hidden identity as a secret agent with super-powers. This gives the series an interestingly different vibe to The Six Million Dollar Man. There never was anything ordinary about Steve Austin. Before he became the bionic man he was already a hero - a test pilot and world-famous astronaut. Being a hero comes naturally to him. Becoming the bionic man hasn’t changed his life all that much. He was already doing extraordinary things that no ordinary person could ever hope to do. But before becoming the bionic woman Jaime Sommers really was just an ordinary girl. Being a super-heroine does not come naturally to her.

Also interesting is that Steve Austin had to be coerced into becoming a secret agent and he was initially very resentful. Even though he’s a born hero there’s a part of him that would like to return to the small town in which he was born and become ordinary. Jaime on the other hand is not only a volunteer - she was the one who pressured Oscar Goldman into letting her become a secret agent. She’s the complete opposite of Steve Austin - she’s an ordinary girl who yearns to be extraordinary.

The series itself has a slightly different feel compared to The Six Million Dollar Man. In a lot of the stories Jaime isn’t doing the secret agent thing, she just gets involved in situations in which her bionic power happen to come in handy. The Bionic Woman at times feels more like a family-oriented adventure series while The Six Million Dollar Man was more overtly a sci-fi/spy series.

While The Six Million Dollar Man has Steve dealing with missions involving national security a lot of the stories in The Bionic Woman involve Jaime personally, or involve people she knows personally.

There was an intention to continue doing crossover episodes and in fact Steve Austin makes his reappearance as early as the fourth episode.

Angel of Mercy takes Jaime to the South American republic of Costa Bravo where the American ambassador is trapped in the middle of a civil war. Jaime has to get him out, with the help of hardbitten helicopter pilot Jack Starkey (played surprisingly by Andy Griffith). Her cover is that she’s a nurse. Maybe that wasn’t one of Oscar’s brightest ideas - she knows nothing about nursing and can’t stand the sight of blood (which adds some amusing moments). This one is rather similar to one of the first season episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, Little Orphan Airplane, with this time Jaime using her bionic powers to rebuild a broken-down aircraft. Jaime gets to use her bionic powers a lot in this episode.This episode works, largely because Lindsay Wagner is so charming and amusing. She really was starting to settle into the role.

A Thing of the Past takes Jaime back to her day-to-day life as a schoolteacher. The only excitement is that the school bus crashes but no-one is hurt thanks to the quick-thinking bus driver. And then the world of gangsters starts to intrude into Jaime’s small-town everyday life. That bus driver had a past and it’s caught up to him and Jaime is caught in the middle. It’s an OK episode. Lee Majors makes a totally unnecessary brief appearance but given that The Bionic Woman hadn’t yet established itself it made sense from a promotional point of view. It is however Jaime who does all the heroic stuff.

In Claws Jaime has to mind a wild animal farm for her friend Susan Victor (played by Tippi Hedren who in real-life was involved in caring for big cats). One of Susan’s animals is a ridiculously tame pet lion but the local ranchers are convinced that the lion has been killing their steers. If Jaime can’t discover what’s really going on then the future looks grim for the lion. This is an episode that veers dangerously close to heart-warming territory.

In The Deadly Missiles a ballistic missile with a de-activated warhead lands in a reservoir near Los Angeles. It appears to have been fired from the ranch of wealthy industrialist J.T. Connors (Forrest Tucker), an old friend of Jaime’s. Jaime refuses to believe that J.T. could actually be involved. But her job is to find out. And she has to find out before somebody fires another missile with a live warhead. Jaime is torn between her duty and her loyalty to a friend. A pretty decent episode.

In Bionic Beauty Oscar orders Jaime to enter a beauty pageant. The pageant is a threat to national security but he doesn’t know why. Jaime has to find that out. This episode is mostly filler with the beauty pageant stuff distracting from the actual plot. But since the plot isn’t particularly good maybe it was a good idea after all to focus on the beautiful girls. Not a very impressive episode.

In Jaime's Mother Jaime thinks she’s seen her mother. Which is disturbing, since her mother died in 1966. Jaime fears she’s going mad. Oscar isn’t happy. But Jaime still thinks her mother may be alive. This is another episode more focused on Jaime personally and on her emotional state than on secret agent missions although there’s more to the reappearance of Jaime’s mother than one might think. It’s all a bit contrived and with a bit too much emotional angst.

In Winning Is Everything Jaime has to enter a desert car race in a south-west Asian country. Oscar has hired failed Grand Prix driver Tim Sanders to drive with Jaime as navigator. Her real mission is to pick up a tape hidden by an American spy. Almost the entire episode is taken up with the car race (which I guess is exciting) and the very feeble plot gets largely forgotten. Not much of an episode really.

Canyon of Death is another episode in which Jaime gets personally involved. One of her pupils, John Little Bear, wanders off into a restricted area in the desert and discovers something very dangerous. It relates to the testing of a top-secret atomic-powered jetpack flying suit. This is definitely an episode aimed squarely at a very young audience. The idea of an atomic-powered flying suit is amusingly retro for 1976. Not a very good episode.

Fly Jaime is basically a rehash of the Six Million Dollar Man episode Survival of the Fittest. Rudy Wells has to fly to South America, on a charter flight, to pick up a secret formula. Jaime goes along as his bodyguard (masquerading as stewardess Miss Winters). The plane crashes and the survivors are stranded on a deserted island and among the passengers are killers after that secret formula. It’s OK but if you’ve seen the Six Million Dollar Man episode referred to then you’ve seen this one.

The Jailing of Jaime starts out with Jaime getting a straightforward assignment - to deliver a top-secret code-breaking device to a military base. It turns out no to be so straightforward and Jaime winds up in jail, suspected of treason. Of course no prison can hold the bionic woman for very long. She breaks out, determined to clear her name. Her ability to break out of impossible places will come in handy again later. A routine but entertaining episode and we do get to see just how strong she really is.

It was an ironclad rule in the 60s and 70s that every action-adventure series had to have at least one episode in which an evil double of the hero or heroine was running around causing mayhem. And so we get Mirror Image. Yes, the bad guys have surgically altered a woman to make her look exactly like Jaime and her mission is to kill Oscar Goldman. The idea is hackneyed but it’s executed reasonably well with Lindsay Wagner varying her performance subtly when she’s playing the double. A good episode.

The Bionic Woman goes spooky in The Ghosthunter, with Jaime up against witches, ghosts and things that go bump in the night. A top government scientist and his daughter have been troubled by what appear to be ghostly visitations. The scientist’s wife, now deceased, had been the descendant of a woman accused of witchcraft in 1692. Jaime soon discovers that weird things really are going on. The episode does a good job of keeping us uncertain as to whether these are genuinely supernatural happenings. There’s a possibility it maybe be an elaborate espionage conspiracy, or it could be something paranormal or overtly supernatural. We’re also kept in doubt not just about the nature of these happenings but also the source. A pretty good way to end the first season.

Final Thoughts

The scripts are sometimes a little on the weak side but the coolness of the concept and Lindsay Wagner’s performances carry the show through a few less than brilliant episodes. On the whole it’s a fun series and it’s worth a look.

Thriller - Lady Killer, Possession (1973)

I purchased the complete series boxed set of Brian Clemens’ celebrated 1970s horror/thriller anthology series Thriller back in 2010. I’ve worked my way very slowly through it and I finally reached the end about a year ago. By the time I started this blog I’d already reaches season four. I’ve posted lots of reviews of the later episodes. And now I find myself wanting to revisit the earlier seasons. It is after all around twelve years since I’ve seen some of these episodes.

So if I’m going to do this I should start right from the very beginning.

Lady Killer

Lady Killer is the first episode of the first season and was originally screened in April 1973. Lady Killer was, like just about every episode, scripted by Clemens.

Lady Killer starts in an English seaside hotel. Paul Tanner is romancing Jenny Frifth (Barbara Feldon) but we’re immediately suspicious of his intentions. He sneaked it into her room to get a look at her passport before making his first approach. Then we hear him talking on the telephone to a colleague or accomplice and we realise that for some presumably dishonest reason he is planning to manipulate Jenny into falling in love with him.

Which he has no trouble doing. Jenny is pretty and seems like a pleasant person but she’s obviously shy and lonely, and we know from that phone conversation we overheard that Paul has selected her specifically because she is a lonely lady.

Jenny is swept off her feet. Had she been less lonely and a bit more worldly she might perhaps have realised that this guy is just a bit too smooth and too charming and that he knows every trick in the book when it comes to playing with a woman’s emotions. Jenny is so emotionally starved that she agrees to marry Paul even though she’s known him for just a couple of days.

Gradually she notices little things, or little things are pointed out to her, and the seeds of suspicion are planted in her mind. The problem is that Paul is incredibly quick-witted and is able to provide a plausible explanation every time.

We know that Paul is up to something and it’s pretty obvious what his plan is. But don’t despair. Brian Clemens has a few very neat plot twists up his sleeve.

The casting is quite interesting. Robert Powell was an obvious choice to play Paul. No-one could do oily sinister charm and emotional manipulativeness better than Powell.

Jenny is played by Barbara Feldon. Yes, 99 from Get Smart. She gives a terrific performance, capturing Jenny’s unworldliness and vulnerability without ever allowing her to seem ridiculous or pathetic. And her performance is totally believable - Jenny reacts the way a rather lonely woman desperate for love would react.

The other major female character, Toni, is played by Linda Thorson, which is somewhat surprising since Clemens and Thorson had a fraught and uneasy relationship on The Avengers. Thorson is excellent and her performance is also believable - she has certain logical motivations but they’re complicated by emotion and Thorson makes Toni just sympathetic enough - we don’t approve of her actions but we can understand them.

The icing on the cake for me is the presence of T.P. McKenna, one of my favourite British character actors of that era, in a secondary but crucial role.

All the performances are extremely good and, most importantly, Powell and Feldon and Powell and Thorson work exceptionally well together.

A mystery-thriller needs to have a coherent plot but it doesn’t matter if it’s a little far-fetched. That’s the nature of the mystery and thriller genres. In real life people rarely plan incredibly elaborate crimes, but that’s why real-life crime is boring. The mystery-thriller genre should have nothing to do with realism. As long as the plot has internal coherence there’s no need to ask yourself if anybody would really carry out such a complicated crime which apparently required three years’ worth of planning.

It’s a clever enough plan. Not dazzlingly original but the sheer effort and sacrifice and patience required to make it work are impressive. It won’t take most viewers very long to figure out what Paul’s plan is. That doesn’t matter because Clemens has a couple of very nifty little plot twists to spring on us in the third act. And those plot twists are very cleverly executed.

That’s so much here to enjoy but the greatest pleasure comes from the performances of Robert Powell, Barbara Feldon and Linda Thorson. They really are a joy to watch.

Lady Killer is a great way to kick off a brand new series.

Possession

Possession is episode two and already the series is shifting gears to keep us on our toes. Suddenly we’re in supernatural territory, with a haunted house story. With Thriller you could never be sure if there were going to be supernatural elements or not. And the supernatural could be handled in a rather ambiguous way in this series.

In this case the setup is a classic haunted house story. Successful businessman Ray Burns (John Carson) and his wife Penny (Joanna Dunham) have just bought a lovely old house in the country.

At first everything goes well, with just a few very tiny odd things that disturb Penny. Then there are problems with the central heating and the basement floor (which for some mysterious reason had been concreted) has to be dug up. A gruesome discovery is made, which seems to provide a partial solution to a 20-year-old mystery. This discovery also explains some increasingly odd events. There is a ghost haunting the house, but whose ghost? Is it the ghost of the victim or the murderer?

The obvious step is to get a medium to conduct a séance. As is always the case in movies and TV the séance turns out to be a seriously bad idea.

Penny is now quite frightened and Ray is pretty shaken as well.

And there’s the matter of the murder that takes place nearby. There’s no connection of course but it is an odd coincidence.

This story leads us up the garden path pretty effectively. We think it’s a very conventional ghost story but things are by no means as simple as they appear to be.

There are some clues as to what is going on, clues such as the killer’s fondness for whistling Greensleeves, but these clues can mislead us if we’re not careful.

It’s a clever variation on the haunted house theme.

So two very good episodes right at the start of season one.

Robert Miall's UFO-1 Flesh Hunters

UFO-1 Flesh Hunters was the first of two novelisations of Gerry Anderson’s 1970 sci-fi TV series UFO. Both were written by John Burke under the name Robert Miall. UFO-1 Flesh Hunters was published in 1970. This was a novelisation rather than an original novel and was based on the episodes Identified, Exposed, Close Up and Court Martial.

John Burke (1922-2011) wrote countless novelisations of movies and TV series in the 60s and 70s, including Moon Zero Two, based on Hammer’s extremely interesting movie of the same name. The Moon Zero Two novelisation is actually pretty good.

UFO was not just a fun alien invasion science fiction series - it also had a bit more psychological complexity than you might expect. A lot of the focus was on the personal price that had to be paid by people working for a top-secret organisation (called SHADO) set up to defend Earth from murderous attacks by UFOs. In particular there was a focus on the loneliness of command. The head of this organisation, Commander Straker, has to make frighteningly difficult decisions and he has to make those decisions alone. Even some of his subordinate commanders, such as Lieutenant Ellis (in charge of Moonbase), have to be prepared to sacrifice their personal lives if necessary. It was a surprisingly character-driven series.

The author spends the first third of the book giving us the setup - governments have known for years that alien invaders have reached Earth but they have to make sure that the public knows nothing about this, in order to prevent panic. Test pilot Paul Foster blunders across the truth, and he will face consequences.

While this part of the book necessarily involves a lot of info-dumps it’s hard to see how that cold have been avoided. Anybody who had seem the first few episodes of the series would have known all this stuff, but anybody who had started watching the series several episodes in, or anybody who hadn’t yet watched the series, was going to need to have the show’s fairly complicated premise explained.

Fans of the series would not have minded since one of the things they liked about UFO is that it wasn’t totally action-oriented.

The book also gives us an introduction to the most important characters from the series. Straker, the most interesting character of all, remains a bit of an enigma but that’s the type of man he is. He does not reveal his emotions. Not ever.

SHADO’s biggest frustration is that they have no idea why the aliens are attacking Earth. Then they get a lucky break. They recover an alien from a wrecked UFO. This answers some of their questions, and the answers are terrifying. And what they’ve learned just serves to raise more questions.

There’s a major security leak in SHADO, and there’s an ambitious plan by SHADO to discover the home planet of the aliens.

Burke shuffles the sequence of events around a little, with events from the second episode taking place before events from the opening episode. He has legitimate dramatic reasons for doing this however.

I generally enjoy TV tie-in novels but I have a strong preference for original novels based on a series rather than novelisations and this book is a good example of the potential problems with novelisations. It’s based on four episodes of the series and the novel is therefore very episodic with no strong narrative thread tying things together. Originally novels are often interesting because they offer a writer a chance to explore characters and situation in more depth and from slightly different perspectives. This book does not do this. We learn no more about the characters than we learn from watching the series. In fact, give the high standard of acting in the series and in particular given Ed Bishop’s subtle performance as Straker we actually learn a good deal less about the characters from the novel. The novel also feels incredibly rushed with no real dramatic tension or suspense.

While my experiences with original novels based on TV series has generally been quite positive I was rather disappointed by this book. The events described in the book seemed so much more interesting when watching them on the screen.

Unless you’re totally obsessive about collecting UFO memorabilia you’d be well advised to skip this book.