Destination: Moonbase Alpha by Robert E. Wood

Author:Robert E. Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Telos Publishing Ltd
Published: 2014-01-10T08:00:00+00:00

ITC AND COMPARISONS

Regarding ITC, Christopher Penfold has stated: ‘Every time an episode was completed in script form it would be shipped off to ITC and they would make their comments. Unfortunately Gerry was very much in thrall to ITC when he felt his relationship with them was threatened. This was where a lot of disputes rose. Often what happened was that we’d finally get a script we were all pleased with; Gerry was pleased with it, Martin was pleased with it and Charles was pleased with it. Off it went to ITC and back it came with comments that just tore at the fundamental structure of the thing. Gerry would say, “Back to the drawing board …”

‘It was very demoralising to have to respond to that. We all felt that sufficient homage had been paid to the requirements of the American market in the way the whole thing had been set up in the first place. We also all felt that the way to succeed in the American market was actually to inject the quality of difference and the originality that we all had to bring to it … I found I was publishing scripts that I didn’t myself believe in one hundred percent. It became more and more impossible for me to stay there, and Gerry and Sylvia realised that.’

The cast and crew also had certain difficulties in dealing with ITC, as Zienia Merton recalls: ‘We used to get this a lot in the first year. If they thought one of us might be getting out of line, they would say, “Somebody in America [at ITC] doesn’t like you.” And you were meant to be very, very frightened and just keep quiet. It used to be used as a threat now and again, like a big stick. Someone in America – they never told you who it was. It was, “This faceless person, who could actually kill you, doesn’t like you, in America.” It was brought out every now and again.’

Christopher Penfold added: ‘I think that, as a person responsible for the making of a television drama series, you have an expression of faith in the product that you are putting your life into. The best of what we see on television are the successful expressions of those acts of faith. They’re often original ideas and they almost invariably originate from the creative writer, not from a television executive. I think, as Johnny has said, that we actually snuck one in under the wire on the first series. The eye of the network, the eye of ITC, was not immediately upon us. So I think we evolved – in a fairly short space of time – a fairly coherent and quite ambitious idea of what we could achieve in this new [show]. And it was something to which we were passionately committed.

‘I remember feelings of great dread when I saw a big car draw up outside the studios at Pinewood and the boot open and the film cans of

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