Out of the Unknown, season 4 (1971)

Out of the Unknown was a science fiction anthology series which was produced by the BBC from 1965 to 1971. Four seasons were produced altogether. Out of the Unknown was reasonably successful with both critics and the public but this didn’t stop the BBC from junking most of the series in the early 70s. Only twenty episodes survive.

The original idea had been to do adaptations of stories by distinguished science fiction writers. By the fourth season that idea had largely been abandoned, and in fact the series seemed to be moving away from actual science fiction altogether and becoming more thriller-orientated. Irene Shubik, who had conceived the series back in 1965, had long since departed.

Five episodes from the fourth season still exist.

This was still the shot-on-videotape-in-the-studio era of British television, and although the BBC seems to have been prepared to spend some real money on the earlier seasons this fourth season is starting to get a very low-budget feel to it.

Whether To Lay a Ghost even qualifies as science fiction is very dubious. As the title suggests it’s a ghost story. This was 1971, so naturally it had to be a ghost story about sex.

Eric Carver (Iain Gregory) is a very wealthy and very trendy young photographer. He and his beautiful wife Diana (Lesley-Anne Down) have just moved into a rather nice old country house which they’re restoring. Eric and Diana are very much in love and have a perfect marriage, except that they don’t have sex. Diana was raped some years earlier and she doesn’t do sex.

It now appears that their house has acquired a ghost. The ghost is only visible in photographs. Eric is not happy about the ghost, and you can’t really blame him since it keeps trying to kill him. Diana on the other hand is rather excited about the ghost.

Eric decides to call in professional help. Dr Philimore (Peter Barkworth) is a scientific ghost-hunter and he’s also a psychiatrist. It doesn’t take him too long to realise what is going on, and it won’t take the viewer very long either.

Lesley-Anne Down’s performance is the highlight, absolutely dripping with twisted and unhealthy sexuality. There is no way To Lay a Ghost could get made today. The obsession with sex in so much British TV of that era can be very tiresome but at least they tried to be honest about it and weren’t afraid to follow a story through to its logical conclusions.

To Lay a Ghost isn’t great television but it’s not bad.

This Body Is Mine employs a very timeworn science fiction idea, switching minds and bodies, but it at least puts the idea to reasonably good use.

Mild-mannered research scientist Allen Meredith has invented a mind-swapping machine. He’s been responsible for other brilliant inventions but he never seems to make any real money from his ideas - it’s ruthless businessman Jack Gregory (Jack Hedley) who always seems to make the money. This time Meredith is determined to get the better of Gregory. Meredith and his wife Ann (Alethea Charlton) have cooked up a clever plan. Meredith will exchange bodies with Gregory, then while impersonating Gregory he’ll make out a very large cheque to himself.

It’s a good plan but it goes wrong because Meredith doesn’t understand the sort of man Jack Gregory is and makes some colossal blunders, while Ann starts to think that ruthless hyper-masculine businessmen are a whole lot sexier than mild-mannered research scientists.

John Carson and Jack Hedley both do extremely well in their tricky roles, essentially having to play each other as well as playing themselves.

This is another episode that could not get made today. Like To Lay a Ghost it touches on issues of sexual dominance and submissiveness, in ways that might well trigger apoplexy in modern viewers.

There’s a very cynical feel to this episode, verging on black comedy. This Body Is Mine works reasonably well.

Deathday is a pure psychological thriller, and an extremely bad one. Adam Crosse (Robert Lang) is an inoffensive and rather bumbling local journalist who discovers his wife is having an affair. She taunts him with it. He instantly changes into a cold calculating master criminal planning the perfect murder, then later he changes into a guilt-ridden basket case.

The idea is presumably to make some sort of comment on the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy. Unfortunately it’s done in a very obvious and crude way. The performances are clumsy. The whole thing is utterly unconvincing. It tries to be arty but ends up being muddled and pretentious.

It’s yet another episode that is focused on sex. There’s some gratuitous nudity to make us think it’s all very modern and daring.

Identity seems to be a bit of a theme running through the fourth season. In Welcome Home Dr Frank Bowers (Anthony Ainley) is a psychiatrist who has been recovering in a mental hospital after a car accident. His recovery is now complete and he’s looking forward to seeing his wife again, in the picturesque little country cottage she’s been preparing for his return. The reunion doesn’t go smoothly - his wife claims that she’s never set eyes on him before and there’s another man in the cottage who claims to be Dr Frank Bowers (played by Bernard Brown).

It’s bad enough that someone is trying to steal his identity (and his wife) but it seems that there’s some vast conspiracy. Everyone seems to be involved. Even the police. He suspects it has something to do with an experimental drug he has heard about, DK-5. It’s a kind of brainwashing drug. But what could the purpose of the conspiracy be? Could an intelligence agency be behind it? Or even a foreign power? Uncovering the conspiracy is obviously vital but Frank’s main concern is for his wife. It seems likely she has been forced into playing a role in this nefarious scheme and she could be in real danger.

So we have once again an episode dealing with the mutability and fragmentation of identity. Moris Farhi’s script does some clever things with these ideas. The atmosphere of paranoia is nicely done but most importantly we’re not sure exactly what is going on and we’re not sure how much of what we’re being told can be believed. It’s not just that people might be lying. They might not even know themselves whether they’re telling the truth or not. Welcome Home is clever and disturbing and entertaining.

The Man in My Head is yet another exploration of identity. A team of commandos is about to blow up a power station. They have no idea what country they’re in, or how they got there. They have no idea why they’re meant to blow up the power station, or whether this means they’re actually at war with the country concerned. Consciously the commandos know nothing of their mission. They’ve been programmed by subliminal briefing. They’re little more than automatons.

Things start to go wrong when one of the commandos, Fulman, accidentally breaks the capsule implanted into his teeth. The drug triggers a second set of programming, which is the cover story in case they are captured. Fulman is now operating according to instructions that are totally contrary to the instructions under which everyone else is operating. Other tensions start to build up. Every action has been carefully planned and programmed which causes stress if things don’t go according to plan. And several of the commandos have decided not to obey their programming - but of course they may have been programmed to refuse to follow their programming. They have no way of knowing how much free will they have, if any, and no way of being sure if what appears to be happening is real or simply something they’ve been programmed to believe they are experiencing.

The script, by John Wiles, is complex and twisted. The execution of the story is helped a great deal by the superb set designed by Jeremy Davies. It’s colourful and complicated and looks very industrial and futuristic and rather forbidding but in an interestingly arty and stylish way.

The five surviving episodes of this final season are a mixed bag. Deathday is an embarrassing misfire but the other four are all quite good, and all fairly interesting. What’s particularly impressive is the thematic consistency - questions of identity, illusion and reality figure in all of the stories. The Man in My Head is my personal favourite, being both provocative and remarkably impressive visually. The fourth season has a rather different feel compared to the earlier seasons but in its own way it’s just as interesting.

Out of the Unknown was throughout its run wildly uneven in quality. Some episodes are complete and utter rubbish. Others are simply superb (The Machine Stops from season 2 is outstanding). On the whole the BFI DVD boxed set is worth getting and it includes a host of extras (including audio commentaries for eleven episodes).

Out of the Unknown - The Last Lonely Man (1969)

The Last Lonely Man, originally transmitted in early 1969, is the only episode from the third season of Out of the Unknown to survive in its entirety. I’ve already blogged at length about the first two seasons of this interesting but wildly uneven BBC science fiction anthology series.

Out of the Unknown was intended to be a series of adaptations of notable stories by well-known science fiction authors. This formula was largely adhered to in the first three seasons but abandoned in season four.

The third season saw the series switch to colour and also saw changes to the production tram with Alan Bromly taking over from Irene Shubik as producer and Roger Parkes coming in as script editor. They had however limited control since Shubik had already commissioned scripts for all thirteen episodes.

The Last Lonely Man was adapted by Jeremy Paul from a story by John Brunner.

This episode deals with an intriguingly different future. Society has been changed dramatically by the advent of Contact although at this stage no-one has quite realised the true significance or scale of the change. Contact is a government program that offers  citizens a kind of technological immortality. Everyone is to have at least one and preferably several Contacts. Contact is achieved by visiting a free government clinic. A complete copy of a person’s brain patterns is recorded and implanted into the brain of their Contacts. If the person dies his personality instantly jumps into the brain of one of his Contacts.

No-one need ever fear death again. No-one need ever truly die. The only disadvantage is that when you die you have to share a brain with another person - and that other person will from that time on have to share a brain with you. This is however a very minor problem  - the government has done studies and it’s really no problem at all. 

In this new world of virtual immortality everyone is much happier, although they are a little more careless. Not having to worry about dying means not having to fuss so much about taking precautions. In fact when people go to the movies and see images of people being slaughtered they laugh uproariously. Death is something to be light-hearted about.

If you decide you no longer want someone to be your Contact you can always cancel the contract - this is known as expunging the person. It’s no big deal. It happens all the time. You can do this at any time - as long as the person is still alive. Once they’re dead and they’ve made that final jump into your brain the process is permanent. The government has done studies on this as well and it’s also no problem. In any case they provide Adjustment Clinics for the tiny handful of people who have really very minor problems as a result.

James Hale (George Cole) is sure that the government is right to tell people not to worry. He’s not worried. He’s quite happy when Patrick (Peter Halliday) begs him to be his Contact. Patrick has just been expunged by Mary (Lillias Walker). Patrick’s problem is that Mary was his only Contact. Now he is not covered. This means if he dies now he will be really dead. James is a nice guy though and he’s happy to be Patrick’s Contact, purely on a short-term temporary basis until Patrick can make other arrangements with one of his many friends.

Needless to say James will find out that Contact is not quite as foolproof and trouble-free as those reassuring government television commercials claim. He will also discover, indirectly, a paradox about immortality. Immortality can actually make some people more afraid of dying.

This is a clever and well-constructed story with several neat and genuinely unexpected twists. It’s the kind of science fiction story that does not require much in the way of special effects In fact it requires none, nor does it require elaborate futuristic sets. It’s about ideas, not gadgetry. This future world looks pretty much like 1969. The fact that it could be done at minimal expense must have been a considerable relief to the BBC which was notoriously tight-fisted when it came to television science fiction budgets. Amazingly enough though it still manages to look cheap even by BBC standards.

Of course if considered in any detail the whole premise is pretty much scientific nonsense but it’s the idea in the broadest sense that is the point of the story and it’s a provocative idea.

Apart from the excellent script the major plus here is the terrific performance by George Cole. 

The first season of Out of the Unknown had varied quite alarmingly in quality and this inconsistency continued in season two, with brilliant moments such as The Machine Stops and some fairly dire moments as well. The Last Lonely Man is one of the better moments and it’s excellent television. Highly recommended.

Out of the Unknown, season 2 (1966)

All anthology television series tend to be rather uneven in quality and tone - it’s very much in the nature of such programs. The BBC’s science fiction anthology TV series Out of the Unknown (which ran from 1965 to 1971) was more uneven than most, with the episodes ranging from brilliant to absolutely atrocious.

Sadly only four of the episodes from the second season survive and three of them will be discussed here. I've discussed the fourth surviving episode, the superb The Machine Stops, in detail previously and I've also written about season one elsewhere.

Season 2, episode 8, Tunnel Under the World

Tunnel Under the World manages to both brilliant and atrocious at the same time (although fortunately the brilliance outeighs the atrocious elements). It was adapted from a Frederick Pohl short story and went to air in 1966.

June 15th seems to be a perfectly ordinary morning for Guy Birkett (Ronald Hines), apart from the fact that he woke from a bad nightmare about an explosion. Oddly enough his wife Mary (Petra Davies) had a very similar nightmare. There are the usual little annoyances. The newspaper is full of advertisements. The radio broadcasts advertising non-stop. There are even loudspeaker vans outside their door irritating them with advertising. A man named Swanson keeps wanting to make an appointment with Guy but Guy is too busy to see him. Guy works for a chemical company but for some reason he tries to avoid going anywhere near the factory - it’s entirely automated and staffed by robots. The robots have had human brain patterns implanted in them, which Guy finds rather disturbing.

The next morning, June 15th, Guy once again awakes from a nightmare. The advertising is still all-pervasive. Swanson is still trying to see him. Guy is still busy. The morning after this, June 15th, is fairly irritating as well. Guy has not yet realised that every morning is June 15th but he is starting to realise that something odd is going on.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the answer to the puzzle has something to do with advertising - the script has already bludgeoned us over the head with that idea. The solution also turns out to have something to do with evil cigar-smoking capitalists who look like they’ve just stepped out of a 1930s Soviet propaganda poster. 

Despite the extraordinarily crude political message of the story the episode does contain some very very good genuine science fictional ideas. It’s a pity that the cardboard villains weaken the impact of these ideas.

Production designer William McCrow did a great job with the sets which reinforce the paranoid atmosphere very cleverly (and much more subtly than the script). 

Tunnel Under the World deals with many of the themes that obsessed science fiction writers in the mid-20th century - paranoia, social atomisation, the fine line between reality and illusion, the crushing of the individual spirit. It’s a bit of a mixed bag but it’s still very much worth a watch the final sequence is chilling and quite brilliant.

Season 2, episode 4, Level 7

Level 7 is an object lesson in how not to do television science fiction. It’s preachy, didactic, obvious and dull. It’s yet another nuclear war scare story, which must surely be the most tedious of all science fiction sub-genres. Level 7 was adapted by J. B. Priestley from Mordecai Roshwald’s novel.

Level 7 is the lowest and most secure level of a nuclear bunker from which nuclear war can be conducted by push button. The personnel are carefully selected from people with no emotional attachments. They live in a secure sterile environment where they become totally dehumanised. The story makes use of every possible cliché of this cliché-ridden sub-genre. The commanding officer (played by Anthony Bate) is a stereotypical evil military type. The personnel are given numbers rather than names. Life is regimented and surveillance is constant. There is of course the over-sensitive guy who cracks up under the strain, which doesn’t work because he’s already clearly so neurotic that he would never have been selected in the first place. The hero suddenly switches from gung-ho enthusiasm to agonising doubts for no reason whatsoever. 

Apart from being incredibly preachy the biggest problem is the total absence of dramatic tension. What should be the key dramatic moment is handled with extraordinary dullness. The sets are flat and uninteresting. The lighting is flat. Everything is flat and lifeless. OK, it’s supposed to be a dehumanising environment but in television terms it’s boring. And it looks cheap, the way only a BBC production can look cheap.

This is message television but the message falls flat because nothing interesting happens, the acting is wooden, the direction is insipid, the dialogue is lame, the pacing is leaden. The greatest challenge to the viewer will be staying awake. Avoid.

Season 2, episode 3, Lambda 1

Lambda 1 is a mess. Luckily it’s an incredibly entertaining mess!

In the future air and rocket travel has been replaced by something much more revolutionary - tau travel. To get from New York to London you travel through atomic space right through the Earth! The difficulty is that you have to travel through different modes - Gamma Mode, Delta Mode, Epsilon Mode, etc. And the tau ships sometimes slip unexpectedly from one mode to another which has disturbing and frightening effects. The most frightening thing though is the mysterious Omega Mode. Some people claim it doesn’t exist. Others are sure it does exist but don’t want to talk about it. In fact the very idea of Omega Mode has turned tau ship commander Dantor (Charles Tingwell) into an alcoholic.

Now the passengers on the tau ship Elektron have discovered that Omega Mode is all too real. They are trapped there and they are going slowly mad. The only hope is for tau controller Paul Porter to pilot the original tau ship, Lambda I, into Omega Mode to rescue them. To do this he will need the assistance of psychologist Eric Benedict (Ronald Lewis), because Omega Mode is not just a phenomenon of tau physics but a state of mind.

If none of that makes any sense to you don’t panic. It made no sense to me either but it didn’t stop me from throughly enjoying this delightfully outrageous and goofy tale. There’s lots of delicious technobabble and as a bonus there’s lots of psychobabble as well. There’s some delirious overacting with Charles Tingwell in particularly going totally over-the-top. There are psychedelic special effects. There are hints of eastern mysticism. There are sets that would have been rejected as too cheap for Doctor Who. And lots of breathless excitement!

You just have to put your brain on hold and enjoy the ride. Highly recommended!

It is of course unfair to judge the second season by the four surviving episodes but they are all we have and overall the impression is of a series that sometimes set its sights too high but somehow succeeded brilliantly against the odds (The Machine Stops), sometimes set its sights high and failed, and at other times was all over the place covering the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous. It's still an interesting series that took risks and it's worth having a look at.

Out of the Unknown, season 1 (1965)

In the early 1960s Irene Shubik had been story editor on a British ABC science fiction TV series called Out of This World. This was when Sydney Newman was head of drama at Britain’s ABC Television. A few years later both Newman and Shubik had moved to the BBC and Shubik suggested doing a similar anthology series but with stories based on the works of well-known science fiction writers. The result was Out of the Unknown, with Shubik producing. The series was successful enough to last for four seasons although that didn’t stop the BBC from junking most of the series a few years later. Twenty episodes survived the holocaust and have now been released on DVD by the BFI.

The episodes were originally to have 75-minute running times. Shubik (fortunately) persuaded the BBC to cut that back to 60 minutes. In fact 60 minutes is still just a little too long for most of the stories - in retrospect 50 minutes might have been preferable.

As you would expect in an anthology series it’s a bit hit and miss. Some of the hits are very impressive while some of the misses are spectacularly bad.

The idea of basing the series on published novels and short stories had some merit although it caused problems. The episode based on a Ray Bradbury story was never able to be repeated because Bradbury had demanded colossal sums of money for each screening. The concept did give the series a veneer of respectability though, which may be why the BBC bought the idea.

The first episode that went to air was No Place Like Earth. It was based on two John Wyndham short stories and normally it’s difficult to go wrong when adapting Wyndham. Unfortunately the result in this case is catastrophically bad and after such a dismal start it’s surprising the series survived. This episode illustrates rather nicely just about every mistake you can make in a television production. It’s excessively talky, there are agonisingly long stretches of incredibly tedious expository dialogue, the pacing is glacial, it’s heavy-handed and inept in its attempts to make political points and in general it’s simply pitifully dull. It’s also very badly acted. The costumes are silly and the special effects are crude. It’s one of the most truly awful pieces of television that it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter.

The plot involves the survivors of the destruction of Earth and the choice between the tyranny of Venus and the apathy of Mars. The attempts to add an anti-colonial message are crude and obvious and irritating. It has one redeeming feature - the opening shot is quite effective in evoking an atmosphere of strangeness and stillness. My advice is to watch the first minute for that one shot and then hit the stop button.

If you’re tempted to give up on this series after this dismal start you’d be making a big mistake. The second episode, Counterfeit Man, is quite superb. A space mission to one of the moons of Jupiter seems to have picked up an extra passenger. At least the ship’s doctor is convinced that one of the crewmen has been replaced by an alien. An alien who is an exact duplicate of the crewman. In fact he’s such a perfect counterfeit that it seems to be impossible ever to prove the doctor’s suspicions. Counterfeit Man benefits from some fine acting by Charles Tingwell and Alex Davion and especially by David Hemmings. The set design is austere but effective. 

Costumes seem to be a real problem in this series - as in the first episode they’re a mixture of the silly and the dull. On the other hand the special effects and the makeup effects are very well done. Philip Broadley’s script (from a story by Alan Nourse) is intelligent and has some nice twists. Director George Spenton-Foster builds the suspense very effectively. A good story well told. If No Place Like Earth is the BBC approach to science fiction at its worst then Counterfeit Man is the same approach at its best.

Stranger in the Family, written by David Campton, is another strong episode. Charles (Richard O’Callaghan) is a young man who is different. He has no fingernails. He also has special powers. He can persuade people to do things. He can persuade people to do absolutely anything. His parents have tried to isolate him from the world but there are people who know about him and they want him. But for what purpose? It’s a creepy little tale but oddly moving as well. O’Callaghan gives a mesmerising performance and gets good support from Justine Lord as an actress with whom he becomes obsessed and Peter Copley as his devoted but increasingly desperate father. This is one of those stories, which enjoyed quite a vogue at the time, about the possible next step in human evolution. There is a bit of 60s silliness about using these powers to stop powers but on the whole it’s a well thought-out and powerful story.

The Dead Past is based on an Isaac Asimov story. It’s a time travel story with a difference. Time travel is impossible but a scientist develops a technology for viewing the past, rather like viewing a movie. His invention is the Chronoscope. The government seems to have developed in the direction of a soft totalitarianism. The government controls all scientific research, in fact all academic research, and access to the Chronoscope is strictly limited. This causes immense frustration to a historian who is determined to prove that the Carthaginians weren’t so terrible after all. He enlists the help of a physicist and they indulge in what is known as intellectual anarchy - unauthorised scientific research. They discover some very curious things about the Chronoscope.

The audio commentary for this episode features two of the original crew including director John Gorrie. Gorrie makes some scathing but very pertinent criticisms of the modern BBC culture.

Time in Advance is based on a story by William Tenn with Edward Judd tuning in a compelling performance. This episode has an intriguing central idea - Edward Judd and Mike Pratt play two pre-criminals. In this future society you can confess to a crime before you commit it, and also serve your sentence before you commit the crime. In this case both these men have served seven years on a penal planet for murder. Now they have been released and have been given a special licence to commit one murder each. Having already served their time they will face no further punishment. Both men have spent seven years being totally obsessed with the murders they plan to carry out. But a lot can change in seven years. It’s a clever idea and the script uses it to examine issues of friendship and betrayal.

The audio commentary for Time in Advance is particularly good with director Peter Sasdy explaining in detail the enormous differences between doing a television program in 1965 and doing television today. In 1965 there was no such thing as post-production on television. Editing on videotape was virtually impossible and was almost never done. A program such as this was done very much in the way live television had been done. The points that Sasdy makes really do put this series in perspective. It’s rather talky and slow-paced by today’s standards but given the way that multi-camera shooting in the studio was done at the time these faults were simply unavoidable. And of course the special effects seem primitive by today’s standards. One of the strengths of this series is that such limitations were taken into account and the stories were chosen because they were the kinds of science fiction stories that required very little in the way of special effects. The focus was on ideas rather than gadgets and on emotions rather than action.

Sasdy also points out, quite correctly, just how effective black-and-white can be for science fiction. In fact in my own view futuristic societies often seem more convincing and more futuristic-looking in black-and-white.

Come Buttercup, Come Daisy, Come...? by Mike Watts suffers from its inability to surmount the basic silliness of the story. Carnivorous killer plants are probably best left on the printed page. When attempts are made to visualise them onscreen it’s very difficult to avoid an Addams Family feel.

Sucker Bait was adapted by Meade Roberts from an Isaac Asimov short story. A spacecraft has been sent to investigate the possibilities of colonising a planet. An attempt had been made a century earlier to colonise the planet. After apparently thriving for three years the colonists all died under circumstance that were never explained. This new mission includes the expected collection of scientist but also includes a mnemonic. At this point in the distant future humanity has become very dependent on computers but experience has shown that computers rather fatally lack the ability to make unexpected intellectual connections and they lack the faculty of imagination. To compensate for this children with odd mental abilities are selected at a very young age and trained to supply those qualities that computers lack. On this mission the mnemonic is Mark Annuncio (Clive  Endersby) and he’s typical of the breed - he is capable of startling and profound insights but he is very difficult to get along with. He’s the type of young man who would today be labelled as having Asperger’s Syndrome.

The story is mainly concerned with the nature and the importance of memory and it succeeds quite well. The beautifully understated performance of noted Australian character actor John Meillon is a major highlight. As is the case with most of these episodes the set design looks a little clunky today but is still quite imaginative.

Some Lapse of Time is unfortunately extremely poor. That’s probably inevitable given that it was based on a short story by John Brunner, a writer noted for his dreary political sermonising. This episode bludgeons the viewer with its anti-nuclear message while the science fictional elements are embarrassingly silly. It’s also let down by a ludicrously histrionic performance by Ronald Lewis. 

Thirteen to Centaurus, based on a J. G. Ballard story, is by contrast a superb story with challenging ideas and extremely well-handled.

Season one closes with The Midas Plague, directed by Peter Sasdy from a Frederik Pohl story. It comes as something of a surprise, being not only a comedy episode but a very good one that combines intelligence with plenty of genuine laughs.

The transfers are, considering the program’s age, remarkably good. More than half the episode come with audio commentaries and they’re almost invariably stimulating and informative.

Despite the unevenness that you expect in an anthology series the first season of Out of the Unknown is fairly impressive. There are a couple of real clunkers but there are quite a few absolute gems and the hits outnumber the misses. The better episodes can stand comparison with any science fiction television from any era. There’s an emphasis on ideas rather than action but happily the ideas are more often than not truly interesting and developed intelligently. In general the scripts are literate and the acting is exceptionally good.

Out of the Unknown is an example of 1960s British television at its best. Highly recommended.