But still, The Storm That Saved A City, broadcast in early January, commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of a ferocious hurricane that claimed the lives of over twenty people in the Central Belt.
Perhaps I remember it, as a very small child, because my brother had been born three days earlier.
How austere Glasgow looked in my childhood! Housing stock in the city was said to be in a ruinous state and this natural disaster led to the refurbishment of tenements. Coincidentally, yesterday, I paid for roof repairs to my own tenement property in the East End, where deterioration over the last couple of years has been exacerbated by storms.
How does this connect with my usual subjects of vintage and modern pop culture? My faint recollections of January 1967 include the colourful pages of a hardback Space Family Robinson annual. Also, eight days ago, the Horror Channel repeats of Lost In Space came to an end.
Dan Spiegel's Gold Key comics series was published between 1962 and 1969 and it became associated with Irwin Allen's tv series in 1966, since they were not dissimilar concepts.
The Space Family Robinson ( Craig, June, Tim, Tam and their pets Clancy the dog and Yakker the parrot) travelled in Space Station One and used Spacemobiles as runabouts. In the UK, like the slightly later Star Trek, original comic strips were crafted for a British comic- in this case, Lady Penelope, a publication for space age young girls.
The flesh-eating butterflies and the robot civil war sounded so exciting!
I was very keen on the imagery of the annual, its snakes and ladders game in particular. I must have seen Lost in Space as a child in the Sixties but my clearest memories are from Thursdays in 1971- a time I also associate with my dad's bank pay days and shopping trips to Calderwood in East Kilbride, where I would buy Kirby's Fourth World comics.
Like the 1968 Dr. Who annual ( which features a similar game), this book cemented my fascination with tv sci-fi adventure.
Lost In Space was repeated on Channel 4, on Sunday afternoons, circa 1988, I think. As a would-be roistering actor laddie, I would miss some episodes for weekend play rehearsals but I remember the b/w first series best. In those early episodes, the cowardly, greedy and fey Dr. Smith is clearly a sinister villain, an enemy agent with lethal intent. But quite quickly, he is softened in to a camp uncle figure: self-centred, lazy, pompous but strangely lovable.
It begins as serious sci-fi for kids and one of the most touching episodes for me was Will's accidental journey to a Capra-esque small town where he effectively gains a temporary older brother.
If Return From Outer Space is one of the best b/w episodes, The Anti-Matter Man in the garish third series is also very good. The men are evil duplicates of the ones we know and the usually-irascible Don is deeply sinister in the shadow dimension. I wonder if this wasn't an influence on Grant Morrison's Earth 2 graphic novel?
There are a number of returning characters in the three series: the green siren Athena; the sympathetic android Verda; the space department store manager Mr. Zumdish and Farnum, the space showman. The faintly ridiculous but anonymous Saticons also appear a couple of times, with their sparkly bowler hats and a very young Kurt Russell is a memorable guest star. But despite the madly exciting new theme tune for series three, it's often a disappointing show, where whimsy and illogic are too prominent. The focus on the comic trio of Will, the robot and Smith does a huge disservice to Judy and Penny- Angela Cartwright was a fine young actress whose delicacy and integrity was grossly underused.
However, a family in sci-fi adventures with alien monsters and robots has a powerful appeal beyond the slapstick of space Vikings or space bikers. I think that Lost in Space is at its most affecting in scenes between Prof. John Robinson and his children ( maybe its my age and job role?).
Originally screened on ITV, there was no direct Lost in Space equivalent on the BBC until a Gerry Anderson pilot was screened at the end of a run of Dr. Who repeats in early December 1976. An aborted compilation of The Seeds of Doom was replaced by 1975's The Day After Tomorrow ( broadcast under its subtitle, Into Infinity.
Space: 1999 pilot Nick Tate and occasional guest star Brian Blessed, as Harry and Tom, head the families who were the crew of the spaceship Altares. They are on a mission, like Lost in Space, to visit Alpha Centauri. Through their passage via a black hole- a fairly new concept for family space adventures- they are catapulted into the cosmic trippiness we associate with the ITC sister series. However, despite an exciting score, since it was intended to be a science-fact show for kids and Anderson failed to secure a budget for further episodes, it's a fairly dry one-off. Honestly, it really would have benefited from a comedy robot, like Disney's later Black Hole.
Into Infinity was screened again in 1977 but I'm not sure if "viewers in Scotland (had) their own programme " in this case. I don't even know for certain now which year I saw it in. I do know it was repeated once more over 30 years later, on BBC 4. The show can be found again, however, as I did last year on the dvd The Lost Worlds of Gerry Anderson.
Of course, Lost in Space had a big screen incarnation twenty years ago, starring John Hurt, Matt "Friends" Leblanc as Don West and Gary Oldman as a distinctly evil Dr. Smith. (Alan Davis draws upon the mutated, arachnid Smith for Dr. Doom in his FF The End miniseries.) The film has its longeurs and a darker tone than seasons two or three but it's fairly faithful to the relationships and themes of the first run of the tv series,
I know that if I were pitching an ITV show against Jodie Whittaker's Dr. Who this autumn, the premise would be a family lost in space...
Coming soon: Dr. Who. Again! The definite article, you might say,
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