Back in 1962 there was a British TV show called Out Of This World. It was a spin off of Armchair Theater and it ran for 13 episodes with Boris Karloff as host. That's Boris on the cover of New Worlds Science Fiction, they promoted the show in the magazine. OOTW was created by Irene Shubik for ABC Television. Irene had been a story editor for AT, Sydney Newman was the producer of that series. Irene is an SF fan and she wanted to do a series of adaptations of SF stories by writers like Isaac Asimov. The Sheckley story The Seventh Victim had been adapted for AT as Murder Club, that proved to be a sort of pilot for the new series. Thirteen episodes were commissioned and produced.
After the first series was done both Sydney and Irene departed for the BBC and any further series were not produced. At the BBC Irene produced 4 series of Out Of The Unknown, another SF anthology show as well as many other programs. Only 20 episodes of the 49 exist today. There's a DVD but it's gotten pricey and I'm not that interested in paying $50-100 for it. Sydney of course went on to create Doctor Who.
Out Of This World suffered the dreaded VT wiping and sadly only the adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Little Lost Robot exists as a complete program. It's on a BFI DVD along with two other episodes that are audio only. I watched all of it this morning. The video is typical of the era and the audio is fairly good. There's a nice booklet with an essay about the show. On the disc there's PDF of the script of another episode and Little Lost Robot has an audio commentary.
Isaac Asimov's Little Lost Robot is adapted by Leo Lehmann and directed by Guy Verney. I've been seeing some of Guy's work of late, he directed the episodes of Pathfinders In Space trilogy I watched a couple of weeks ago. He directed an episode of The Saint which I've seen. I've not seen much of his other work.
Maxine Audley plays Dr Susan Calvin; Clifford Evans, Murray Hayne, Gerald Flood, Hayden Jones play all the humans; Roger Snowdon plays the robot. The robots are pretty poor looking but there are 21 of them, each filled with an actor. They don't look much different than what you would have seen produced by the special effects departments of the various TV production companies of the time. Lack of time and low budget drives the look. The budget for each episode was £5000 and even in 1962 that didn't stretch too far.
Gerald Flood is an annoying scientist who's working on a special project. His robot assistant is one of the robots on the project, like the other robots, it's had the First Law of Robotics adjusted for their work. Gerald, annoyed at the robot, tells it to go get lost. It sneaks on board a ship with 20 identical robots that are due to be shipped to another planet. The humans want the robot off the ship but they can't tell the robots apart. The robot won't own up to being the robot they want. Dr Calman is called in to find that robot. She developed the laws of robotics. She does a few tests and finds the lost robot. The side effect is the robots have seen a robot kill Gerald Flood. Susan worries that it might be a bad thing.
It was a good production, I had forgotten the story, I read it 40 plus years ago. I haven't had much interest to go back and re-read his work but I've always had a soft spot for his robot series. The commentary is with 96 year old Leonard White, he was the producer of the show, he's joined by Mark Ward and Toby Hadoke. Toby was moderator on many commentaries for the Doctor Who DVDs. It's fairly interesting but the audio from the program creeps in on the audio commentary and that was kind of annoying.
Tom Godwin's Cold Equations is adapted by Clive Exton and directed by Phillip Hammond. Clive some might remember wrote all 23 episodes of Jeeves And Wooster with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. He wrote plenty of other TV over the years and a few films. Peter would go on to direct 19 episodes of The Avengers and many other TV shows. His last work was on the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series. Tom's story would be adapted in 1989 for an episode of The Twilight Zone and again in 1996 for a TV movie called The Cold Equations.
Peter Wyngarde is Captain Barton, he's tasked with a special delivery to a colony. Jane Asher is a 16 year old girl who sneaks onto his ship, she thinks she can go see her brother and pay a fine for sneaking onboard. Trouble is, there's no fine, just a quick trip out the airlock for a stowaway on a special run. Poor Peter has to deal with telling this girl, it's her or the sick men, there's no fuel to carry the extra weight. Slowly the realization comes to her, she's fucked. She gets a chance to talk to her brother then she gets tossed into space. Tough life if you're stupid.
I'm being somewhat cold but not as cold as space. We're supposed to feel some sympathy for the girl but I don't. Sometimes people screw up and die. It's their lot in life. Don't screw up. The episode runs a bit shorter than the LLR one, I suspect some of the more silent bits were trimmed out. It was recorded by a fan and it's remarkably good for that.
Imposter is based on the Philip K Dick story of the same name, Terry Nation adapted it, Peter Hammond directed. Patrick Allen is Major Peters, he believes that scientist Roger Carter has been replaced by a robot bomb. He's got to find out if Roger is human or a talking ticking time bomb. The episode was also fan recorded but it's incomplete and the sound is of varying quality. It was the first TV adaptation of a Philip K Dick story. The same story was made into a movie in the 80s. At least you can see that.
I was happy to have seen and heard everything. Doubt I'll get back to it for a while but glad to have picked it up.
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