The "Television Symbol" (aka "Bats Wings") ident, 1953-60

BBC Television Service

British public service television service (November 2, 1936 - October 7, 1960)

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began experimental television broadcasts in 1929, using an electromechanical system developed by John Logie Baird.

Limited regular broadcasts using this system began in 1932, and an expanded service began in 1936 as the BBC Television Service.

The BBC broadcast the first ever piece of television science fiction - a performance of an extract from the play R.U.R. - in 1938. Between 1938 and 1960, the BBC Television Service broadcast 18 science fiction productions, many of which were performed live and not recorded - or recordings were deleted -  so they do not exist in the archives.

The BBC's biggest success during this time was the Quatermass trilogy of serials, and the controversial production of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The BBC lost its monopoly in television in 1955 when Independent Television (ITV) began. In response, the BBC felt it should change its identity and priorities. As a result, the BBC Television Service was relaunched as BBC tv in 1960.

The BBC broadcast two adaptations of Karel Čapek's play; an extract in 1938 - the first ever piece of televised science fiction - and a complete version in 1948, which starred a young Patrick Troughton. Both versions were adapted, produced and directed by Jan Bussell.

The first visual adaptation of H G Wells' 1895 dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novella was broadcast on the BBC Television Service and starred Russell Napier as "the Time Traveller".

A scene from the stage production of J B Priestley's 'Summer Day's Dream' to be presented on Sunday and Thursday. Left to right are Olaf Pooley [out of picture here], Adlina [sic] Mandlova, Herbert Lomas, Eileen Thorndike, Adrienne Corri and John Salew.

Summer Day's Dream (TV play, 1949)

A nuclear Third World War has caused Britain to revert to a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist state.

Summer Day's Dream is a 1949 play by J B PRIESTLEY, which was produced by Michael MacOwan and first performed in Priestley's native Bradford on August 8, 1949. The cast of the stage production appeared in the BBC production, which was performed live on October 30 and November 3, 1949, on the BBC Television Service, and no recordings exist.

Set in 1975, the play evokes a world where a It takes its title from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is being produced by two members of the English family the play is based around.

The play was also performed for television in 1994, on BBC 2. Dawlish was played by Sir John Gielgud.

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Radio Times feature

After the Atom Bomb - Rural Simplicity?

HOW often do a good many of us feel the emotion that impelled Mr Priestley to write Summer Day's Dream! It is the cry of urban civilisation, wishing to return to simplicity and nature. You will find it in Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Some, like Thoreau, make the break of their own volition, and retire to the woods. Others - like the family in this play - have it forced upon them, The date is 1975. The Third World War (the Atomic War) has devastated these islands: under the World Settlement Plan, most of the inhabitants have emigrated. England settles down into small rural communities. The scene of Summer Day's Dream is an old manor house on the South Downs; and there live the Dawlishes - an old man, his daughter, and his two grown-up grandchildren. There are no telephones, no cars, and even (as far as one can see) no BBC. Life is a matter of farming and barter; beer is home-brewed; the young people make their own songs and write their own poems; there are no entertainments outside the great event of the village concert; it is idyllic.

Now, you can argue about this! You can say that life in small and simple communities does not, in fact, turn out to be so peaceful, or anything like as morally good, as life chez the Dawlishes. The most primitive communities have often the most complicated assortment of vices. (See Mr Erskine Caldwell, passim.) You don't really change a man's nature by taking him out of a lounge suit and putting him in dungarees, and making him smoke coltsfoot tobacco. Even if most of us share Mr Priestley's wish to Get Away From It All, we have a pretty strong suspicion that after a short dose of simplicity we should feel a remarkable urge to Get Back To It All. You remember the cry of Chekhov's three sisters: "If we could only get to Moscow!' I always thought it a pity that he didn't write the sequel in which the sisters got to Moscow - and then pined for their tranquil, uneventful provinces! And then a third play when they pined for Moscow again! Thus you can argue against Mr Priestley's theory of the simple life. But what you can't argue against is that he does in fact continue, throughout Summer Day's Dream, to convince you that the Dawlishes are really happy in their simplicity.

Into this. Garden of Eden enter three Serpents: by helicopter. There is Franklyn Heimer, Vice-President of the American Synthetic Products Corporation. There is Dr Bahru, an Indian rescarch chemist employed by the South Asia Federation, There is Madame Shestova, of the Synthetic Products department of the Soviet Foreign Trade Commission. They have prospected the South Downs, and found the chalk suitable for the manufacture of Mixture B. They will 'tear the guts out of the Downs," bring in Chinese labour, and build a roaring town. Progress is the thing. But their helicopter has broken down, and they must stay for a few days in Paradise before they go back to put in the reports that will destroy it.

It wouldn't do to give away which side wins. But it is bound to happen that these scientists and business people are influenced by the peace and happiness of the Dawlishes; and nobody will be surprised that Madame Shestova - that Ice Queen, that refrigerated Soviet product - falls in love with young, Christopher, Also it is bound to happen (especially when you consider who wrote the play) that there is a rare old argy-bargy, Simplicity v. Modern Civilisation. There is the middle-aged Margaret, resenting the intrusion of the strangers who will interrupt the life which her family has built out of destruction:

You left us nothing but the bare thorn and our bleeding hands; but now our hands are healed, and the thorn is beginning to flower.

There is the eighty-year-old Stephen, the centre and core of the play:

We work for what we need-and that's satisfying and not frustrating-and then when we're not working we enjoy ourselves in our own way. We don't look after machines all day to pay for other machines to entertain us half the night. We find we can make do without a lot of things that were beginning to make slaves of us.

To which, later, the American business man replies:

Far as I'm concerned...it isn't just the power, or the dollars we earn, or even the darned excitement of making something big, but-well, I guess we got a sense of responsibility and duty to the world... Somebody's got to feel that sense of duty and responsibility-and get busy. That's a real man's life, the way I see it.

I myself think that Mr. Priestley could have found better arguments for the three technicians; but his heart is clearly on the side of the simple-lifers, At all events, it is impossible to be disinterested in the theme of Summer Day's Dream; and the excellent cast that gave the play this year at the St Martin's Theatre has been re-assembled for the television production.

Stranger From Space (TV serial, 1951-52)

The adventures of Ian Spencer, a human boy befriended by a Martian boy called Bilaphodorous who has crash-landed on Earth.

Stranger From Space was not the first television science fiction serial - that honour goes to the American series Captain Video And His Video Rangers in 1949 - but it was Britain's first ever science fiction television serial, and the world's first in the genre to be written specifically for children. Its creators were screenwriter Hazel Adair (co-creator of ATV's Crossroads) and her actor/producer/director second-husband RONALD MARRIOTT.

All 10-minute episodes were broadcast live over alternate weeks. The fortnightly schedule allowed the creators to incorporate viewers' letters and suggestions into the episodes. No recordings of the series exist in the archives.

Only the series' title character, Martian boy "Bilaphodorus", appears in every episode. The human boy that befriends him, "Ian Spencer", was missing from episodes 9-11, according to the Radio Times listings. The character of "John Armitage" was introduced in those episodes, but all three characters appeared in all episodes of season 2.

Radio Times did not publish a feature on the series, nor were there synopses of each episode, so it is not clear how the story progressed. There was, however, a novelisation by Adair & Marriott published in 1953.

The novelisation was illustrated by artist Tony Hart, best known for his appearances on children's television presenting programmes such as Vision On (1964-76), Take Hart (1977-83), and Hartbeat (1984-93). Hart broke into television in 1952 after meeting a children's television producer at a party, and he became the resident artist on Saturday Special (1951-53). One of the writers on the show was Hazel Adair, as was producer of Stranger From Space, Michael Westmore. 

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Season 1 (1951-52)

Season 2 (1952)

Broadcast on the BBC Television Service

BBC Television Service broadcast the first adult science fiction written specifically for television, and the first serial to feature Professor Bernard Quatermass.

Time Slip (TV play, 1953)

A man dies and is brought back to life with a dose of adrenalin, but he now lives five seconds ahead of anyone else.

This 30-minute play was broadcast on November 25, 1953 on the BBC Television Service and does not exist in the archives.

No cast members were named in Radio Times.

Writer Charles Eric Maine sold his first radio play, Spaceways, to the BBC in 1952. Due to its popularity, it became a novel as well as a movie. Time Slip was also turned into a movie - Timeslip - in 1955, with Maine making significant changes to his story. In 1956 the film was shortened and distributed in the US as The Atomic Man. In some areas as a double feature with Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956). In 1957, Maine turned the script into a novel, The Isotope Man. Timeslip was broadcast on BBC 1 in 1983.

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"Many writers have been fascinated by the idea of time and the pricks it can play. Very few of us understand the Fourth Dimension - to say nothing of the Fifth and Sixth - but most of us have an uneasy feeling that there is a great deal more to time than just yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

"In this short play Charles Eric Maine has hit on an exciting and original variation on the theme. One of his characters, John Mallory, has died, but has been brought to life again by an adrenalin injection. Everything about him is now normal except that his time-sense is out of synchronisation by 4.7 seconds. He understands what is said to him and replies lucidly to questions - 4.7 seconds before they have been put to him.

"Dr Slade, a hospital psychiatrist, becomes interested in Mallory's case and determines to cure him. After consultation with an eminent physicist friend of his, George Ingram [uncredited], he decides on the desperate and, to say the least of it, medically unorthodox step of smothering his patient with a pillow, killing him, and bringing him to life again with a more carefully administered injection of adrenalin."

Angus MacVicar adapted his own original radio serial for television; the first part of his The Lost Planet series of adventures for children.

Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale adapted George Orwell's 1949 dystopian political novel.

Angus MacVicar's second part of his The Lost Planet series of adventures for children.

Professor Bernard Quatermass returns.

Space School (TV serial, 1956)

The story followed the exploits of Winter children who live in a small house on the inside rim of Earth Satellite One, which rotates slowly in space against the background of the earth. Their father spends his time surveying the moons of Mars for possible landing sites.

Between classes at space school, the Winters become friendly with the various people who live and work in the colony.

Space School was a children's science fiction serial in four parts written by Gordon Ford. Little is known of the writer except that he wrote three television plays for children between 1955 and 1956, all produced by KEVIN SHELDON.

This series is believed to be lost.

The series acted as a lesson in science and then-current theories about space travel, postulating a possible future amid never-knowingly-too-thrilling space adventures.

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Episodes

Broadcast on the BBC Television Service

On Earth Satellite One

IMAGINE going to school in a Space Suit. Try to picture what it would be like to live with your mother and father in a colony of four or five hundred engineers, scientists, space pilots, and planetary explorers on the inside rim of a great wheel silently turning 1075 miles above the surface of the earth. Life would be very strange at first, there would be no night and day as we know them, and there would be no winters or summers, The force of gravity might play unusual tricks at times and there would be an ever present danger from stray meteor showers; but there would also be compensations. From the observation port you could watch the earth turning beneath you once every two hours; there would be trips to the Moon, Mars, and Venus; and fascinating lessons on unusual subjects such as astronautical navigation.

In Space School you will learn about the exciting adventures of the Winter children (Wallace, Winifred, and Wilfred), who, together with their mother live in one of the little houses on the inside rim of Earth Satellite One, while their father is away surveying possible landing sites on the moons of Mars. Among others you will meet are "Space Commodore Sir Hugh Sterling", a veteran of interplanetary flight, played by John Stuart (already known to you as "Dr Lachlan McKinnon" of The Lost Planet and Return to the Lost Planet); "Space Captain Michael O'Rorke", the hot-headed Irish dare-devil (Matthew Lane); "Space Engineer 'Tubby' Thompson", played by Donald McCorkindale, his Cockney assistant; "Miss Osborne", the schoolmistress (Julie Webb); "Sam Scroop" the trapper of the Spaceways, played by Neil McCallum; and "Humphrey Soames", ace newshawk of the Interplanetary Television Commission, portrayed by a newcomer to Children's Television, David Drummond.

You will see the artificial satellite turning slowly in space against the background of the earth, and space tankers with their special cargoes of food, air, water, and space fuel, darting noiselessly from planet to planet, and the strange craft from other worlds and other systems.

Gordon Roland has designed some extremely unusual settings and the Space Ships and Satellite for Space School have been built by John Ryan.

KEVIN SHELDON

The End Begins (TV play, 1956)

The End Begins is a play by English screenwriter Ray Rigby, written in collaboration with his wife Jean when working as a booking clerk at Victoria station. He submitted it to the BBC and they broadcast a production of the play on May 17, 1956 on the BBC Television Service. Unusually, the play was not given a repeat performance and no known telerecordings exist.

The play was later adapted for Australian television in 1961.

The action takes place on a small island off the coast of Ireland. Time, the present.

An American soldier washes up on a small island off the coast of Ireland and finds himself at a crofter's cottage who tells of a sudden Third World War and a civilised world has ceased to exist. Further survivors arrive, who are also escaping the plague and famine-ridden radio-active mainland. More soldiers arrive, bringing their civil, military, personal and racial problems. The newcomers find themselves coping in their little world with the issues that beset civilisation, and striving not to make mistakes which will bring them also to catastrophe.

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To the small island off the coast of Ireland comes a Negro in American army uniform, a survivor of a boatload from the mainland. Soaked, exhausted, and distraught, he makes his way to the crofter's cottage which is the home of Hugh Pakenham, an Englishman who bought the island five years before and now shares its solitude with the only remaining locals, old Shaun O'Donnell and his wife. The Negro, Hank Christians, has a terrible tale to tell-of a sudden, appalling, cataclysmic Third World War in which 'Everybody just took their stock-piles up in the skies and dropped them. They all went crazy.' With the result that the civilised world has ceased to exist.

And now the other survivors from Hank's boat make their way to Pakenham's house - a little elderly doctor named Wincot, a middle-aged man named Jarrow, and a girl, Valerie. This ill-assorted handful of people must stay on the island, for the radio-active mainland is plague and famine-ridden, and here they must try to recreate the atmosphere of civilisation. Their numbers are soon increased by a trio of soldiers, and thus in the problems they have to face - problems civil and military, personal and racial - these atom-age Crusoes find themselves coping in their little world with the issues that beset civilisation, and striving not to make mistakes which will bring them also to catastrophe.

The last BBC adventure for Professor Bernard Quatermass.

Robert Brown, Tim Seely, Diane Clare, and Ann Todd as they appear in 'The Offshore Island'

The Offshore Island (TV play, 1959)

The Offshore Island is a play by English journalist, radio panellist and novelist Marghanita Laski. An avowed atheist, Laski was also a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The play had been written six years previously and forgotten until the BBC bought it in 1957.

The Offshore Island is about nuclear warfare. The play was broadcast live on BBC Television Service at 8.30pm on April 14, 1959. Unusually, the play was not given a repeat performance and no known telerecordings exist.

A British family - young widow Rachel, and her children James and Mary - living on a farm in an isolated valley in the aftermath of a nuclear war finds that their idyll is shattered when a detachment of American troops arrive.

England is a series of tiny pockets of uncontaminated land, eight years after an all-out atomic bomb attack, which an American officer calls "the satellites". These areas are to be neutralised in order that America and Russia might continue their war.

American "Captain Charles" shows compassion by arranging for the Verney family's removal to America but a brutal soldier reveals that contaminated persons would be sterilised and segregated ("They're not concentration camps - they have cinemas and dances and...")

When a truce is declared, a Russian officer, "Captain Baltinsky", says "Before, we needed you as enemies. Now we need you as friends."

The Offshore Island enjoyed a Radio Times front cover

Ann Todd and Robert Brown

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'The Offshore Island'

On Tuesday, BBC Television presents a remarkable first play by Marghanita Laski, set in England eight years after the outbreak of an H-bomb war. It is introduced here by Michael Voysey

IT was more something you felt, like a nightmare. There were those days...we just lay on the floor and I held the children and tried to keep their heads buried in cushions so that they shouldn't look up. They'd said we mustn't look or we'd be blinded. You couldn't think for the noise. I don't know how long it was before it died away but when it did, we were still alive.' So says Rachel Verney as she reflects on the horrors of the past in Marghanita Laski's moving and provocative play The Offshore Island.

When we meet Rachel Verney, who will be played by Ann Todd, she is a young widow living with her two children James and Mary in an isolated valley which has somchow escaped contamination. James has a strong love for their farm and longs to see it grow and develop. Mary, like all young teenage girls, longs for pretty dresses, dances, and a boy friend: an ordinary family with ordinary hopes and ambitions, yet their lives have become extraordinary for it is eight years since they have had any communication with the outside world. When their solitude is broken by the arrival of a party of Americans, their joy is great, but it quickly turns to fear as they face a new terror.

Although viewers will remember seeing the Star Choice presentation of Miss Laski's novel The Victorian Chaise-Longue and cinemagoers will remember the film version of another of her novels, Little  Boy Lost, The Offshore Island is her first play.

Whether she is questioning a challenger on What's My Line?, answering a deeply involved question in The Brains Trust, or writing a play or a novel, Miss Laski shows that she has an instinctive understanding of not only the everyday problems that people have to face but also of the larger problems caused by science advancing more rapidly than the wisdom of man. To be able to express the fears that arise out of these problems through the mouths of characters we can all recognise in a language we can all understand is to be a true writer.

When I first read Little Boy Lost, perhaps Miss Laski's most famous novel, I found it to be one of those great joys in life, 'a book one couldn't put down,' and who can deny that the last lines of that book are among the most moving in contemporary literature? I can say the same of The Offshore Island. Having begun to read it, I had to know what happened next-a simple criterion, although it is fashionable to decry it; but unless your reader, or with a television play, your viewer, wants to know what happens next, a writer has failed in his task. Miss Laski is a true writer indeed, and a true storyteller.

The Offshore Island in the news...

It's just one of those "Things"! But not to worry, for it is actor Stephen Manton behind that foam-rubber and plastic make-up.

Hands Across the Sky (TV play, 1960)

Hands Across The Sky is a comic opera by English composer, pianist, conductor, writer and radio broadcaster Antony Hopkins. It was broadcast live at 10.10pm on February 7, 1960 on the BBC Television Service. Unusually, the play was not given a repeat performance and no known telerecordings exist.

The action takes place in Professor Neutron's laboratory, in the near future. The object of the professor's affections has more time for a green alien.

In his laboratory, Professor Neutron and his middle-aged assistant, Miss Fothergill, are engaged in a hazardous search for a new rocket fuel. The experiment fails – again – and to encourage him Miss Fothergill sings a waltz-song of encouragement: ‘Science, science is my passion’. As it becomes a duet the professor reveals his hidden devotion: ‘ I much prefer the sight of her to further exploration’.

They see an approaching object from space which delivers an unusual visitor to the laboratory – with green skin, horns and long hair. It is Squeg, a Thing. Squeg is shy and sings: ‘I’ve searched the Solar System from end to end, no friendly welcome . . . no wish to offend’. This becomes a duet with Miss Fothergill, and as the professor offers a cup of tea the duet becomes a trio. When the Thing announces ‘my name is Squeg’, the professor responds ‘One of the Saturn Squegs I assume!’ Miss Fothergill has fallen for Squeg and launches into her love song in swing style – as she boogies she declares ‘I love Squeg’. She grapples with the reluctant Squeg, singing ‘Squeg, dear Squeg, we’ll fly away together’. The professor returns and thinks the Thing has gone insane and announces he will shoot him. A trio ensues as she sings ‘Because I love him till I die’. Miss Fothergill leaves, dragging Squeg with her, and the Professor sings disconsolately of what might have been: ‘Side by side, teacher and guide’. He determines to dispose of his rival, and sets out to concoct a potion.

Meantime, Miss Fothergill continues to pursue Squeg and she, too, determines to invent a potion to make her a ‘monster just like Squeg’. The unhappy professor sings: ‘This way to the tomb’ and then sings of his adoration for Miss Fothergill but she rejects him. He decides to die, and drinks the potion he prepared for Squeg. However, he picks up the wrong glass, and drinks Miss Fothergill’s potion instead. His appearance changes to that of Squeg. She sings of her love and all three join in a closing trio ‘Glorious life’. [Pristine Classical]

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Hands Across The Sky in the news...

Antony Hopkins' space opera "Hands Across the Sky" will be seen in a recording on BBC on Sunday. Set 'in the near future', it is a skit on science fiction, and describes a triangular affair between Professor Neutron, a scientist, sung by Eric Shilling. Miss Fothergill, his repressed, intense and dowdy assistant, sung by Julia Shelley, and Squeg, a Thing from Outer Space, which lands in the Professor's house, sung by Stephen Manton. There is also a Voice, sung by James Maxwell. The Professor adores his assistant, but in vain, for she is devoted to science, That is, until the arrival of Squeg. Antony Hopkins postponed an Easter holiday in Amsterdam to write the score in time for the opera's first presentation at last year's Cheltenham Festival. He wrote it in a week, and comments: "It was meant to be amusing, more like revue in fact, than opera. For instance there's a striptease to rock 'n' roll - probably the first in opera since "Salome" - in which Miss Fothergill starts by removing her white lab coat.

He comes from outer space, his skin is green and he has a gentle, endearing manner. He is also the hero of the comic opera, "Hands Across the Sky" which the Intimate Opera Company presents on BBC tomorrow. Set in the near future. it is a skit on science fiction, and describes a triangular romance between Professor Neutron (Eric Shilling) his intense assistant Miss Fothergill, and Squeg. The professor adores Miss Fothergill, but in vain, for the girl, played by Julia Shelley, is devoted to science-until Squeg appears and she becomes wildly infatuated with his green-hued beauty. The script also includes strip-tease to a rock 'n roll theme. It begins when Miss Fothergill removes her white lab coat and it is claimed to be the first in opera since Salome." "Hands Across the Sky" dates back to the opera company's 25th anniversary libretto contest three years ago when Gordon Snell submitted this light-hearted script. They decided to put it on and co-director Antony Hopkins asked : "Who's going to write the score ?" They told him: "You are." He did.

TELEVISION opera can be tedious but the BBC's "Hands Across the Sky" tomorrow night is likely to be anything but that. It is a skit on science fiction and introduces a Thing from Outer Space called Squeg. Antony Hopkins, to whom many listeners owe a debt of gratitude for introducing them to musical appreciation on radio, wrote the score. He says : "It is meant to be amusing. more like a revue. For instance, there is strip-tease to rock 'n' roll, probably the first in opera since Salome.' and Miss Fothergill starts it all by removing the white lab coat she is wearing as a scientist's assistant."