A chronology, 1953-1998

	Quatermass, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit	Professor Quatermass, on Earth, faces visitors from space: 18.7.53 to 26.1.59
	The Lost Planet and Return to the Lost Planet	From children's radio: 16.1.54 to 19.3.55
	1984	Newly-published book by George Orwell, dramatised by Nigel Kneale: 12.12.54, remade in 65
	A for Andromeda and The Andromeda Breakthrough	Fred Hoyle's characteristic mix of technology and fantasy, featuring a young woman computer-programmed by aliens: 3.10.61 to 2.8.62
	Doctor Who	Adventure serial in time and space: beginning 23.11.63, in black and white...
	Doctor Who	...and, from 1970 onwards, in colour...
	Doctor Who	...and at last in stereo sound. The programme ended on 6.12.89.
	R3	Government thinktank series a la "Doomwatch": 20.11.64 to 28.9.65
	The Year of the Sex Olympics	Controversial play by Nigel Kneale: 29.7.68
	Doomwatch	Environmental disaster-watching: 9.2.70 to 14.8.72
	Out of the Unknown	Series of plays adapting SF novels: 4.10.65 to 30.6.71
	Counterstrike	Lacklustre alien invasion yarn ("Knowing that their own planet is doomed, the Centaurans have for some years been secretly landing on earth. By using human greed and stupidity for their own ends they are confident of eventually controlling or depopulating the planet. One man stands in their way. He is Simon King. Simon King, an alien agent from the Inter Galactic Council..."): 8.9.69 to 10.11.69
	Moonbase 3	Post-Apollo moon base drama: 9.9.73 to 14.10.73
	The Changes	Adaptation of Peter Dickinson's trilogy for children, set in an England where technology suddenly fails: 6.1.75 to 10.3.75
	Survivors	Of a plague wiping out most of humanity: 16.4.75 to 8.6.77
	Blake's Seven	Romanticised criminals fight a guerilla war against the totalitarian Federation: 2.1.78 to 21.12.81
	The Flipside of Dominick Hyde	Two charming time-travel plays: 9.12.80 and 14.12.82
	The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy	Douglas Adams's radio series on the small screen: 5.1.81 to 9.2.81
	The Day of the Triffids	Adaptation of John Wyndham's book: 10.9.81 to 15.10.81
	Artemis 81	Disturbing and very long supernatural play: 29.12.81
	Play for Tomorrow	Six plays looking at a bleak near-future: 13.4.82 to 18.5.82
	Z for Zachariah	Play set in a Welsh valley which has just survived a nuclear war: 28.2.84
	The Tripods	Adaptation of John Christopher's trilogy: 15.9.84 to 23.11.85
	Threads	Play depicting effect of nuclear war on contemporary Britain; horrible and compelling. 23.9.84
	The Invisible Man	Adaptation of H.G.Wells's book: 4.9.84 to 9.10.84
	Star Cops	Detective fiction in low Earth orbit: 6.7.87 to 31.8.87
	Red Dwarf	Comedy in the style of the film Dark Star, as what's left of humanity explore a derelict universe: 15.2.88 to 11.11.93, then a further eight episodes in 97
	Invasion: Earth	The RAF and the Scottish landscape versus two kinds of alien; six episodes, 8.5.98

[Some children's drama and some supernatural material -- such as the excellent The Omega Factor, a sort of early Scottish version of The X-Files -- is omitted, as are several plays which only overlap SF. Other notable British series -- such as Timeslip, The Tomorrow People, Sapphire and Steel and Knights of God -- were made not by the BBC but by regional parts of its commercial rival, ITV, usually for rather lower budgets.]

Decline and fall...

In-house science fiction has a long and distinguished tradition at BBC Television, but it has ended. Since 1992 the BBC has been semi-privatised and it now commissions drama either from outside proposals or from internal groups who are treated as independent businesses in (friendly) competition with each other. The central scenery, design and makeup department, which once employed 600 people working across the whole BBC output, is drastically reduced. In December 1996 the BBC Radiophonics Workshop was closed, having outlived what remained of the costumes archive by six weeks or so. Training courses for young talent still exist but are thinner on the ground, and resources (most importantly human resources) are not generally shared between different programmes. (For instance, it used to be said that every designer in the BBC would have a crack at a Doctor Who serial sooner or later.) Now that producers are on the outside, they have less ability to pull strings; at least some of them feel that there is less of a culture in which they are seen as artists. On the other hand, it's certainly true that the environment of the BBC's best work was at times shambolic, always plagued by union disputes and bureaucratic obstructions caused by too few resources shared too widely. And there was a great rush of creativity in some areas from the new arrangement, though mostly on Channel 4, not the BBC.

Money

The Tripods (15 September 1984 to 23 November 1985) came just before the BBC's mid-1980s crisis of confidence in science fiction. Programmes were becoming more expensive to make and were not yet sustained by the merchandising sub-culture which took off with the growth of home video. In the 1970s the BBC could not match American film budgets, and in the 1980s it could not even match American TV budgets. In 1984, The Tripods was made for around 1 million pounds, a very great deal for a BBC production: but 25 times less than the fatuous American mini-series "V" cost, for instance.

The idea that SF is too expensive for the UK industry goes back at least to 1971, when Out of the Unknown was cancelled (in part because real footage of the Apollo programme could not be matched). The film Star Wars (1978) was another blow to morale: ironically, though, it opened on the same day that Blake's Seven began, and somehow BBC series carried on being thoughtful and fun, if not exactly lavish on sets or effects. The arrival of Star Trek: The Next Generation (premiered in the UK on 26 September 1990) coincided with the final dematerialisation of Doctor Who and its production values appear to have set the seal on the argument.

Back in the mid-80s, more money was buying a smaller audience. A typical rating would show a peak of 6 or 7 million viewers, but with troughs as low as 3 million: roughly a halving since the late 70s. It is unwise to interpret these ratings literally, since:

• video recorders existed but were not yet allowed for
• strike action and much less variety in programming tended to give some shows a near monopoly of the audience in the 1970s, which no longer applied in the 1980s
• Channel 4 had come on air since the 1970s, and the number of TV sets per home increased
• in the 1980s, SF shows were increasingly used as shock-troops (some would say cannon fodder) in being scheduled against the toughest opposition.

But the ratings certainly show a large decline. One might defend SF by arguing that it increases diversity, and that those who like it, tend to like it a lot.

Politics

With costs rising, TV science fiction ate into the adult drama budget, despite being aimed (as most drama staff saw it) at adolescents. 1984 and 1985 were very difficult financial years for the BBC, when the first of several cost-cutting ("Black Spot") committees was active. The second Thatcher government had a huge Parliamentary majority, much of which loathed the BBC on dogmatic grounds. The BBC is politically neutral (by statute, in fact), therefore it did not endorse the government, therefore it was a pack of Red traitors: Mr Denis Thatcher seems to have been especially vehement in articulating this. It was also a big, very 60s consensus-based State concern which spent large amounts of money without knowing where or how. This was not true, but it was believed, because the answer to the question "How much did programme X cost?" was always "It depends what you allow for resources being widely shared". Similar arguments have since recurred in the National Health Service and with similar result.

All this time the Murdoch newspapers - then still quite influential - took a consistently partisan anti-BBC line, as they were to do right through the genesis of Mr Murdoch's satellite TV monopoly. His 1989 MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Festival is generally agreed by historians to be the most philistinic speech ever made about British broadcasting, vehemently opposing all notion of "public service". At any rate, the big guns were all pointing at Broadcasting House.

The BBC is funded by a flat tax, an annual license fee imposed on all owners of TV sets in the UK. Nobody likes this but it seems to be better than all the alternatives. (It remains about three times cheaper than subscribing to satellite TV.) The fee had risen roughly with inflation, but this disguised a long period of growth, since colour TV licenses are much more expensive than black-and-white ones, so that BBC income rose generously in the 70s as the nation went over to colour sets. By 1984 the process was complete and only lean years lay ahead, not least because of the extension to daytime (i.e. mid-day) broadcasting. (The BBC has recently, but unsuccessfully, lobbied for a higher license to cover digital broadcasting, so as to spur a second period of growth.)

In fact revenue was cut, since the government refused to raise the fee by even inflation in 1985, 1986 and 1987. The BBC began cutbacks, partly from necessity, partly from the need to prove it was "serious" about responding to the Conservative right-wing. In this sudden winter, the two SF shows still being made were both axed by Michael Grade. Some commentators have suggested that Doctor Who was picked on deliberately, as a show with a fan-club (unlike the news magazine Panorama, as one insider wryly put it). The BBC was saying out loud: look what we've come to. This is probably a little too Machiavellian but times had certainly changed.

Culture shock

Expensive dramas, such as the BBC's trademark classic serials, need to be championed by the heads of programming. In 1985 the key figures were Jonathan Powell (Head of Drama) and Michael Grade (Controller of BBC1). They were certainly not opposed to genre fiction. Powell had been responsible for first-rate productions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979) and Smiley's People (1982), for example, and Grade was then considered a populist, far from the cultural mandarin he has since become. Still, adventure series in the style of the 70s, like Colditz (1972-4) and Secret Army (1977-9), seemed to have had their day. Attempts in the 80s to recapture the glories of, say, I, Claudius (1976) or Elizabeth R (1971), which had been hugely successful in mixing the classic serial genre with mainstream entertainment, were stillborn: the historical dramas The Borgias (1981) or The Cleopatras (1983) were expensive but made little impact, beyond brief notoriety for some topless dancing girls. The shape of television drama had changed.

Christopher Penfold (script-writer for the second series of The Tripods) felt that BBC executives were simply bewildered by science fiction:

The BBC had Doctor Who for years without really understanding that there was an audience for it, and what the audience actually liked about it. Certainly the television executives were always rather bemused by it, even if they were delighted by its success. When I was working at the BBC a while ago Jonathan Powell asked me what it was about science fiction that audiences liked, and asked me to go away and create a series. I gave it some thought, but quite soon after that the BBC got involved in Star Cops...

(Interviewed in TV Zone 45, August 1993.) Michael Grade himself said of Doctor Who that

A lot of drama shows are reaching their natural end. The writers don't want to write. The actors don't want to act. We need new material.

He felt also that the show had lost "a lot of its wit" and, presumably, concentrated too much on being serious drama, which science-fiction was not supposed to be.

The end of the line

Doctor Who was to be reprieved from the Grade axe, probably thanks to a press campaign secretly primed by the programme-makers which caught the public mood. But it failed to reassert itself: when it most needed a new producer, it could not find one: a variety of misfortunes ensued and after prolonged death-throes the programme was allowed to die in 1989, having had, just too late, a last Indian summer of good material. The BBC's wariness with fans of its own output had now reached the point that it officially denied that any cancellation had taken place.

After 1985, apart from the fading glories of Doctor Who only two new shows were ever commissioned: both for the 1987 season and both by BBC2, the "alternative viewing" channel, not BBC1 as for all previous sci-fi series. One new show was Red Dwarf (15 February 1988 to 11 November 1993; resumed in early 1997), originally sold to the BBC on the strict understanding that it was a sitcom with little sci-fi content.

The other was Star Cops (6 July 1987 to 31 August 1987), a detective-fiction series set in low Earth orbit, created by Chris Boucher (who had been responsible for most of what was good in Blake's Seven). It was cancelled after a run of only nine 50-minute episodes, a tenth having been lost through strike action. An underrated series, it combined subtly layered scripts with a realistic design taken from the NASA and ESA plans for space stations which dominated the moribund space programme of the 1980s. (They remained plans, though a design evolved from them, now called the "International Space Station", began to be occupied during 2000.) Star Cops required no fiddles of the laws of physics and no alien races, and as such is rather in the style of Moonbase 3 (1972), though the plots have interest beyond astronautics. The US show Men Into Space (1959) had also prided itself on "authenticity", though. There are no new ideas.