Tag: BBC One

Happy 50th Anniversary, Lost in Space!

 

Here\’s yet another anniversary, hot on the heels of Star Trek\’s 49th. This time, it\’s the 50th Anniversary of Lost in Space. I remember spending quite a few Friday evenings and (later) Sunday mornings watching re-runs of this on UK television during the early 1970s.

Irwin Allen series were VERY popular on UK television during the late 60s and throughout the 70s, usually on ITV, in opposition to the likes of Star Trek and Doctor Who, which were the mainstays on the \”other channel\”, BBC One (we only had three channels on UK television back then).

Happy 50th Birthday to the Robinson family, Doctor Smith (\”Oh the pain, the pain\”) and the robot.

Again, this one comes courtesy of a reblog from Trek-extraordinaire author Dayton Ward and his excellent The Fog of Ward blog. Go read this blog. Seriously.

Sci-Fi Film Marathon, Saturday 5th July-Sunday 6th July, 2014

I\’ve said several times before that Sundays at our house have become a favourite of mine for sci-fi on TV and DVD, so much so that I\’ve taken to referring to the day as \”Sci-Fi Sunday\”. Well, this weekend was no different, with the local UK Freeview television channels coming up with the goods yet again, airing some excellent sci-fi films over the weekend. The only unusual exception was Channel 5, which most weekends has at least one sci-fi film on, but not this time around (but lots of Disney stuff on today, for anyone who\’s into that kinda thing).

The additional plus this weekend was that Saturday was almost as good as Sunday, for a change. This week it\’s not just \”Sci-Fi Sunday\”, but an entire \”Sci-Fi Weekend\”, during which Film4 hosted no less than four classic sci-fi films, and Channel 4, ITV2 and BBC Three aired one each. Add to that the two sci-fi DVDs that I watched with my friends on Sunday night, and that amounts to quite a sci-fi marathon over two days.

Unfortunately the BBC channels, particularly the two big ones, BBC One and BBC Two, are very poor when it comes to airing any kind of sci-fi, preferring instead to aim for the lowest common denominator and concentrate on an unrelenting garbage diet of soaps, sport and reality TV. I think the BBC considers Doctor Who to be their absolute limit for sci-fi these days, and tough luck if we want anything else. When there\’s no Doctor Who on the BBC channels, there\’s very rarely any sci-fi at all. If it wasn\’t for the news or documentaries, I wouldn\’t watch BBC One or Two at all. The same for BBC Three. Aside from a couple of episodes of Doctor Who on Friday evenings, it\’s complete crap.

Once again, Film4 was the undisputed champ, with two sci-fi films on Saturday, and two more on Sunday. Saturday afternoon started off well, with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Then we did a bit of channel-hopping over to Channel 4 for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), and then it was back to Film4 again for some Arnie in Conan the Barbarian (1982). Sunday afternoon saw Film4 picking up where they left off on Saturday night, with The Phantom (1996), running straight into Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989). The usual Sunday evening visitors started drifting in by that point, so once the Star Trek V film was over, we switched from TV to DVD, with the first part (of three) of the Sci-Fi Channel\’s excellent Dune mini-series (2000).

Then it was back to the TV for another film. Given what I said earlier about the BBC channels being very bad for sci-fi, I almost died of shock when BBC Three actually aired Tron: Legacy (2010). This was followed soon after on ITV2 by The Matrix Reloaded (2003), the very good second film in the Matrix Trilogy. Finally, and taking us from late Sunday night into early Monday morning, it was another DVD, the much underrated fourth film in the Alien series, Alien: Resurrection (1997). I\’ve heard many people whinge about how bad they think this film is. I disagree with them. I always enjoy it when it is re-run on TV.

I\’m slinking off to bed now at just after 4am, exhausted, but very satisfied after two days of great sci-fi films. Here\’s looking forward to next weekend! 🙂

Some Interesting Prehistoric Stuff

I love to browse the Sci-Tech page (page 154) on BBC1\’s Ceefax (teletext) service. There\’s always a lot of interesting snippets culled from various sources such as the New Journal of Physics, Nature and Science magazines. My favourite areas of interest are astronomy and space exploration, and palaeontology, and here are a couple of palaeontology snippets from recent pages:

Apparently scientists in Germany, Switzerland and the US claim that they\’ve found the point at which the African and Indian elephants split and diverged from a common ancestor. They compared genetic research done on both species and other research done on the extinct woolly mammoth and mastodon, and came to the conclusion that the split occurred 7.6 million years ago.

Another interesting snippet concerns the dinosaurs. Accepted theories state that when the dinosaurs first evolved, they swept all before them, and rendered the earlier, more primitive forms of reptiles (known as dinosauromorphs) quickly extinct. Apparently that\’s considered now not to be the case, and both lived side by side for many millions of years.

Just a couple of interesting snippets from the pages of Sci-Tech. Go to Ceefax page 154, and git yerselves ejjicated a bit. 🙂