Very British Futures

The Day after Tomorrow

A fascinating curio from producer Gerry Anderson's peak period, made inbetween seasons one and two of Space: 1999 and featuring many personnel from that programme.

The spaceship Altares, with a photon drive capable of accelerating it to the speed of light, leaves an Earth-orbiting space station. The Altares crew, two families of trained specialists, journey at light speed to Alpha Centauri, experiencing time-dilation. After launching several satellites to transmit information on the Centauri star system back to Earth, guiding future vessels exploring the star system, the families vote to explore further, but a meteorite strike sends their ship accelerating out of control.

Like the original blueprint of Doctor Who and Pathfinders in Space, Special Treats producer George Heinemann, Century 21 owner Gerry Anderson, and writer Johnny Bryne's intention was combine education with entertainment. In particular, the show illustrated Einstein's Theory of Relativity. His famous formula of E-MC2 appeared on each advert break. Speaking to Starlog magazine in 1979, Heinemann said, “When the teacher wrote E = mc2 on the board, I wanted the young viewer to recall the programme and say, "Yeah, I saw a programme about that. I want to learn more about it."

After taking an enforced break from production, this episode marks the return of the podcast as a regular series. I was fortunate to be joined by Felicia Baxter, writer, podcaster and former NASA intern, to look back at this unique British production which was originally shown on both NBC and BBC1. This is not quite the episode as I originally intended it. Due to a rookie error on my part, our original 30 minute conversation was lost, so with Felicia's limited availability that day, we decided to record a summarised 10+ minute version of our initial conversation, covering the main points that had emerged. I always intended this to be something of trial "mini-episode" but it became an "executive summary episode" instead. Nevertheless I hope you enjoy this format, because I would like to make more "mini-episodes" on shorter subjects.

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