It's a full life, if a trifle banal

My contributor's copy of British Science Fiction Television: A Hitchhiker's Guide has just arrived in the post. It is a nice, chunky volume, just short of 300 pages, and on only a quick flick through it's going to be a good read.

My chapter is: "Resist the Host: Blake's 7 - a very British future". Other chapters are:

• "'Futures Past': an introduction to and brief survey of British science fiction television" by John R. Cook and Peter Wright


• "Quatermass and the origins of British television sf" by James Chapman


• "TARDIS at the OK Corral: Doctor Who and the USA" by Nicholas J. Cull


• "Countering the counterculture: The Prisoner and the 1960s" by Sue Short


• "The age of Aquarius: utopia and anti-utopia in late 1960s and early 1970s British science fiction television" by John R. Cook


• "The man who made Thunderbirds: an interview with Gerry Anderson" by Nicholas J. Cull


• "Everyday life in the post-catastrophe future: Terry Nation's Survivors" by Andy Sawyer


• "TV docudrama and the nuclear subject: The War Game, The Day After and Threads" by David Seed


• "Echoes of discontent: Conservative politics and Sapphire and Steel" by Peter Wright


• "Counterpointing the surrealism of the underlying metaphor in The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by M.J. Simpson


• "'OK, homeboys, let's posse!' Masculine anxiety, gender, race and class in Red Dwarf" by Elyce Rae Helford


• "British apocalypses now - or then? The Uninvited, Invasion: Earth and The Last Train" by Catriona Miller

The articles are arranged chronologically, so it's a very comprehensive account of British TVSF from Nigel Kneale to just before new Doctor Who.

In a private entry, espresso_addict wondered whether there was much British television SF. Well, once upon a time, there was. During the 1980s it fell out of favour, and we still haven't connected back to the tradition (the closest I think we've come in recent years is with The League of Gentlemen).

Anyway, here is my list of ten classic British television SF programmes. It is partial and rapidly assembled, and I am sure there are gaps. But I hope it gives a glimpse of that wonderful era in Britain cultural life, between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, when the power of speculative drama was understood, and was not considered solely the province of children's or minority audiences.

( British Television Science Fiction )