Object Z
NB: Big Spoilers – so watch the thing first …
Peter Barry (Trevor Bannister), a science reporter for UK Television who has been tasked with making six episodes about ‘new developments in metallurgy’, visits an observatory in Scotland where junior astronomers June Challis (Margaret Neale) and Robert Duncan (Denys Peek) scan deep space. Quiffed everyman Peter, who often dresses in a natty fleece-lined duffel coat, is the guy things have to be explained to. When astral phenomena are discussed, he claims ‘the only nova I’m aware of is the bossa nova.’ Professor Ramsey (Ralph Nossek), the slightly distracted higher-up, keeps mistaking Peter Barry for DJ Pete Murray. Ramsey demonstrates a system for tracking objects in space and his juniors are taken aback to be told that an unknown mass (presumably the 26th such since the system was initiated) is hurtling on a direct course for Earth. Episode One of the six-part serial is called ‘The Meteor’ and the initial supposition is that we’re in a When Worlds Collide situation. Massive devastation is certain if the object is stone and extinction of all life on the planet likely if it’s metallic. Sir John Chandos (Julian Somers), the UK Prime Minister, keeps calm and carries on with the agonising task of supervising construction of mass shelters which will probably be useless and deciding by lot who will be in the 10% of the British population eligible for survival. Meanwhile, a hastily-arranged world alliance of desperation authorises Ramsey and a cadre of international boffins to rush-develop a missile programme in the hope of knocking Object Z off course.
At the end of Episode Three (‘Flight From Danger’), there’s a moment of relief as Object Z goes into orbit around the Earth rather than smashing into it, followed by a chill as the world realises this means it’s a spaceship from another civilisation and poses a different kind of enormous threat. An alien is seen on a television transmission: a huge human eye viewed through distortion, a curiously effective lo-tech depiction of the unearthly. When Z attempts a landing which would obliterate great swathes of California, US President McCone (Robert O’Neil) reluctantly nukes the giant gooseberry (the object is only clearly seen under the opening credits). Again, relief is short-lived. Ramsey, the nearest Object Z has to a Quatermass, is a doom-sayer about all attempts to cope with impossible situations. Three more Objects are sighted. Logically, they should be Object AA, Object BB and Object CC but they don’t get any fresh designation. Writer Christopher McMaster, who pitched this as grown-up science fiction on the pattern of A for Andromeda (1961), keeps upping already-high stakes, despite the extreme limitations of an ITV children’s slot budget. Some stock footage of rocket launches, riots and radio telescopes is tipped in – we head off to Woomera rocket range in Australia for a spell. There’s a brief wander around the empty streets of evacuated London (presumably shot early on a Sunday morning) on specially-shot film but this is almost entirely studiobound. Drama consists of scientists, politicians and media types who are ‘in the know’ talking through the crisis. The approach echoes The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) but the serial’s media hub is a a television science programme on the model of the then-new Tomorrow’s World (1965-2003) rather than the Fleet Street newspaper of the film. Early on, UKTV vox pops a couple of unimpressed bowler hatted city gents and pair of cynical working class women – comic relief which turns out to be foreshadowing. By the end of the serial, it eventuates that the people in the street were closer to the mark about what’s going on than many supposed experts.
Object Z makes few concessions to the 5.25pm audience, though the romance of June and Robert is so understated one suspects schoolboy requests for no kissing stuff at teatime were honoured. Peter has a modishly-dressed girl sidekick (Celia Bannerman) but the key characters are earnestly dignified middle-aged men grappling with big issues – the Prime Minister admits he didn’t win a place in a shelter in the big lottery. Indeed, all the VIPs are so well-intentioned and selfless that the only real villain of the piece almost comes as a relief. Keeler (Arthur White), leader of the fascist Action Party, sees world crisis as an opportunity for a power grab to re-establish British dominion of the world, bwah-hah-hah. A sub-plot has the TV reporters tracking Keeler down to a cave in Scotland where he’s jamming signals from space to confuse the issue, though director Daphne Shadwell avoids much in the way of physical action. A key escape happens offscreen and this plot thread is left up in the air. Unlike most 1960s UK TV science fiction for children, this offers no whimsy and little melodrama. Almost everyone underplays and the personal feelings, if any, of the characters rarely intrude. We’re told many people around the world have killed themselves rather than be smashed or invaded by Object Z and a lot of other upheaval and conflict is taken as read. White’s entertaining madman turn, sweaty and eye-goggling, is a contrast with the principle cast and his acting style (almost the norm for some kids’ TV) is only matched by bits with familiar telefantasy faces Bernard Kay (as a French right-wing terrorist) and Milton Johns (an Arab sheik) playing to the gallery.
On the model of the Quatermass and Andromeda serials, Object Z keeps delivering ideas at a rapid pace. Each twenty-five minute episode springs two or three startling developments, with biggies saved for cliffhangers. The stratagem of keeping audiences on tenterhooks for a week has mostly been lost in the 21st century but was a telly staple for decades. Viewing the serial on the restored BFI BluRay release, it’s hard to resist bingewatching just to find out what McMaster has up his sleeve to top previous revelations. Episode Six (‘The Solution’) has a couple of jaw-droppers. Skip this if you don’t want spoilers. After investigative journalism uncovers fakery at a desert UFO crash site, Ramsey admits he’s in an international conspiracy of scientists who have rigged up a phantom menace to force squabbling humanity to bring about a world government*. Something similar had been tried in ‘The Architects of Fear’ (The Outer Limits, 1964) and would be again in ‘The Devil’s Eggs’ (Play of the Month, 1966), though the most lasting variation of the concept – cooked up by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, both of an age to be tuning in to ITV after school in 1965 – is the teleporting squid threat of the comic Watchmen (1986-7). Ramsey, who has played the whole story close to his chest, can’t come into focus until the reveal, though McMaster doles out editorial about the character’s beliefs throughout. Nossek does well by the tormented, mendacious boffin – desperate to believe the desired outcome is worth all the chaos (and, it’s stated, death) which has come as a side-effect of his project. Then, in the sort of twist The Twilight Zone had experimented with but which would become more commonplace in 1970s genre films and 21st century TV shows hoping to be recommissioned for another season, the telescopes sight three more objects coming towards Earth and this time they’re not fakes …
*Technocratic World Government was a pet idea of H.G. Wells, notably in The Shape of Things to Come (1936).
Object Z Returns
‘Are the invaders real this time? Do they really exist?’ Liverpool Echo
‘I hadn’t planned a follow-up,’ writer Christopher McMaster told TV Times, referring to his s-f serial Object Z (1965). ‘Viewer reaction was so favourable, however, that two days after the final episode the producer asked me to write a sequel. I finished it in five weeks flat.’
Object Z Returns is missing, believed wiped …*
‘Super exciting news for all Tivvy readers,’ Jimmy Hanley wrote in the TV Times junior section. ‘A new, “specially for you” space science serial called Object Z Returns, which starts on Tuesday. You won’t want to miss it, especially if you like mystery. When the last Object Z serial finished, Professor Ramsay had been put in prison for hoaxing the world about the strange happening in space. But was it all a hoax? Or was it one of those jokes that sometimes misfire and work out to be true? In the new series, the scientists who have spotted three dots on their screen realise they are regularly spaced and appear to be approaching Earth at tremendous speed. Professor Ramsay is the only man who can work out the truth. Are they planets, or out-of-control asteroids or space ships? If they are planets or asteroids, will they collide with the Earth? If they’re space ships, will they be able to stop in time? And if they do, what’s inside? People like us or awful monsters? Do they want to destroy us—or get to know us? I can let you into part of the secret. The things left their planet, which is completely covered in water, about 6,000 years ago, and they have been speeding towards us ever since. So, whatever they are, they must be very intelligent, and understand sciences that we know nothing about yet.’
Hanley slightly misremembers the conclusion of Object Z, in which the audience and the authorities found out Professor Ramsey (Ralph Nossek) had faked an extraterrestrial threat to force squabbling nations to form a world government – but there was no mention of him being brought to trial. McMaster brought back most of the key characters from the earlier serial but replaced TV researcher Diana (Celia Bannerman) with ambiguous glamour girl Terry (Toni Glipin, of The Mummy’s Shroud, 1967) a ‘member of a revolutionary force’ very much in the Avengers mode (newspapers and magazines ran publicity shots of her holding a big gun). Terence Woodfield, who had just played Jesus in two episodes of Mysteries and Miracles (1965) and would play aliens on Doctor Who and The Tomorrow People, plays ‘the Voice’ of the alien visitors. The Daily Mirror tried to get McMaster and director Daphne Shadwell to reveal what the aliens – apparently revealed in Episode Three (‘The Monsters’) – were going to look like. ‘The object has been to make them as repulsive, gigantic and other-worldly as possible,’ said McMaster, possibly with John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953) in mind. Shadwell was slightly dubious, ‘It’s a closely guarded secret. In fact I’m not quite sure myself what exactly they are like. I’m trying to sort that out.’**
As before, McMaster constructed a story with twist on twist. Again, fascist would-be demagogue Keeler (Arthur Wright) tries to take advantage of the situation to make a grab for power – interfering in communications between the World Government and the aliens. The aquatic beings offer some gadgets – like a matter duplicator, handy for replicating packets of cigarettes – but when relations go sour they are capable of inflicting a new ice age (‘the big freeze’) on Britain, almost certainly with newsreel footage of the famous snows of 1963 used to illustrate this turn of events. McMaster opts for aliens who are more careless than malign, with a climax hinging on whether Ramsey – a fraudster responsible for mass casualties, but from the best motives – or Keeler – a raving Mosleyite who now commands a SPECTRE-like international conspiracy*** – can influence the visitors to moderate or amplify the ill-effects of their climate alteration devices.
*Not a Lot of Help Department. I saw Object Z Returns on its original (only) broadcast but have absolutely no memory of it.
**I suspect the serial found a way out of showing the aliens full-on. The TV Times set a competition for young readers to send in their drawings of what water-dwelling beings might look like.
***Did McMaster have something against the French, or were those Day of the Jackal terrorists just in the news. Following Bernard Kay as an unshaven OAS gunman on Object Z, we get David Saire as Keeler’s French hit man Dallier.
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