Very well executed

Better than most people think

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

UFO and the awesome Ed Bishop held me captive on Saturday mornings as a kid... oh and so did the beautiful Gabrielle Drake, too! ;)Just like Star Trek, the stories were great, the drama was real and the effects were rubbish! Just like Star Trek, the actors and everyone else involved took the show seriously which is how it has lasted.It also helped the show by having unspectacular story lines in favor of real characters and good drama. No loose ends tied up to placate the viewers... just a solemn promise of more to come of the same the following week.Amazingly, this show never made it into the Rolling Stone's top 40 Sci-Fi programs... and rubbish like Buffy (which isn't Sci-Fi) did make it in! Which just goes to show that these top lists are either deliberately designed to provoke commentary or they're researched by monkey babies! I suspect the latter.UFO was a fantastic look at the future when the future was fashionable.

Note To T.V. Producers - when making a sci-fi series, it is never a good idea to specify the year in which it is set. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's 'U.F.O.' was made in 1970, but set ten years in the future, meaning it now looks bizarre compared to the reality. No Margaret Thatcher, for instance ( unless she slipped in unnoticed as one of the Moonbase girls! ). My first encounter with 'U.F.O.' came in the pages of the fondly remembered 'Countdown' comic in early 1971. When the series made it to my part of the world a few months later, I was already acquainted with its format and characters.The premise is this; Earth is fighting a secret war against mysterious green-skinned aliens from an unknown planet, who travel in flying saucers that make a distinctive whirring sound. The aliens are not here to take over, but to kidnap people to use their internal organs as replacements for their own, as an unspecified catastrophe is causing them to gradually die out. Set up to defend us is S.H.A.D.O. ( Secret Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation ), headed by Commander Ed Straker ( Ed Bishop ). Its headquarters, concealed behind the facade of a film studio, is a male chauvinist's dream as its operatives are mostly female and shapely. Whenever a U.F.O. is detected entering our part of the Solar System, S.H.A.D.O. launches Interceptors from a base on the Moon. Should the pesky critters elude the Interceptors' missiles ( which was at least once a week ), the next line of defence were the Skydiver submarines ( though we only ever saw one ). Captain Peter Carlin ( Peter Gordeno ) would enter a hatch, gain access to the cockpit of 'Sky One' ( nothing to do with Rupert Murdoch, so don't worry ), the submarine tilted, and its entire front section detached itself and shot into the sky like a bullet. Should Carlin's aim be off, the U.F.O. next had to contend with Mobiles - huge, land-based vehicles not unlike tanks. The aliens knew of S.H.A.D.O.'s existence ( thanks to a number of people under their control ) and did their best to destroy it. In one episode, two of Straker's men are brainwashed and given orders to kill him. In another, a strange crystal found on the Moon drives insane anyone unlucky enough to touch it.All this was tremendously exciting to my eight-year old eyes back in 1971. A war between planets, spaceships, submarines, underground offices, ray guns, cars whose doors opened vertically ( how we all wanted to own one! ), explosions, and Gabrielle Drake looking devastatingly sexy in a purple wig ( her dallying with aliens served her in good stead when she appeared in 'Crossroads' a decade later! ). Derek Meddings once more provided the S.F.X., making this one of the few British sci-fi shows of that period to stand comparison with the better funded American ones. Dinky brought out toy Interceptors and Mobiles ( and before you ask, yes, I had both these! )Of the cast, Ed Bishop was superb as 'Straker', with George Sewell as lecherous 'Colonel Alec Freeman', and Michael Billington providing interest for the ladies as 'Colonel Paul Foster'. The guest-stars included Robin Bailey, George Cole, Adrienne Corri, Michael Jayston, Jane Merrow, Stuart Damon, and Patrick Mower.I.T.V. did not know what to do with the show; many regions dumped it in late-night slots ( including my own - H.T.V. ). The few critics who bothered to review it predictably likened it to Anderson's 'Thunderbirds'. Very unfair, but what you would expect coming from the uninformed.The last few episodes were made after a production break, and experienced film directors such as Cyril Frankel and Jeremy Summers came aboard, resulting in a superb run of stories including 'Timelash' in which Patrick Allen played a malevolent time-jumper, and 'The Long Sleep' with Tessa Wyatt. The latter episode was unusually strong for 1970 television, featuring a drug sequence and an attempted rape. Wanda Wentham replaced George Sewell as Straker's second-in-command.A few years after it ended, 'U.F.O' became a surprise hit on U.S. television, and for a while a second series looked a certainty. But it never happened, and I'm glad it did not because I think the proposed changes in format ( making the Moonbase the focal point of the plots ) would quickly have palled.As I write this, 'U.F.O.' is being screened on I.T.V.-4, and the series came out on D.V.D. some years ago. It may seem strange to young viewers ( I hope they do not think that the 1980 depicted in the show was anything like the real one! ), but I think it stands up well.

This was a fanciful TV program which I believe was filmed and cast in Britain. The special effects were somewhat cheesy with UFOs that looked like huge spinning metal tops from the 1930s. I don't recall ever seeing the aliens, but I believe I watched the same UFO crash repeatedly each time one was shot down. The organization that was responsible for blasting the alien spacecrafts to smithereens was SHADO which seemed to win every battle with the aliens. Each week, you'd see a huge UFO plunging to earth, totally destroyed by SHADO's defense network. What I always had a little difficulty understanding was how a race of aliens who were able to develop a craft that carried them across billions and billions of miles of the universe, was unable to come up with a weapons system that could effectively blast SHADO's defense craft. It seemed like the poor wretches were always out gunned. It would seem that such an innovative and technically capable race would realize the folly of their repeated attempts to break through SHADO's defenses and either come up with a ray gun that would atomize the defenders or cut their losses and move on to easier pickings. Having said all of this, I always watched the program and was quite entertained by it. I don't know whether that was because it was actually a good series or simply so cheesy that I just had to watch it to see just how cheesy it could get. Wow! 9 out of 11 junior space cadets with no life and no grasp of reality were unimpressed by my review. I best be careful they don't zap me with their Mattel jr. space ranger ray guns. Maybe I should have said the series was only cheesy if you're not out of touch with reality. LOL.

In the early 70ies I saw it in B&W, but something that struck me firsthand was the main theme by Barry Gray: what an incredible music! Then there was all these "realistic" future production design: Ed Straker's turbine car, the fighter jet that was launched from a submarine (Sky Diver), the moonbase with these three girls (later I become aware that their hair was purple), and the space interceptors. Another very cool thing were the UFOs, they rotate making a very funny noise. When I buy the DVD collector set, after more than 35 years, I became aware that it was undoubtedly retro, but a very serious approach to a fictitious future environment. The SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization) sounds too much like SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) and all those Cold War's codes and organizations. Highly recommend it for the Sci Fi fans.