I dropped in on the TV
                                    presentation after that. It was for an x-file style

show, which had actually been shot about 3 years before X-files started,

the main
                                    interest was it is an Australian production. Unfortunately I didn't

catch whether it would actually go mainstream
                                    at any point. 

Ah yes, Damon Dark. I've heard a little about it. It wasn't shot before The

X Files started, but it was written and
                                    developed. It's showing on Channel

31 (Community TV) in Melbourne.

Date:Wed, 8 Sep 1999

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Next I went to Damon Dark, a serial produced on a nearly nothing budget for Australian TV. It had a little of the feel of a Quatermass serial but the acting and writing were not up to Nigel Kneale. An industrialist in contact with aliens is using the cellular phone system as a network to control peoples minds. What we saw did not have the music. Maybe with music, with acting and production values this could be a good program. The star and producer is there. I ask if it was inspired by Quatermass. Most definitely Quatermass II.

Admittedly I nodded off on part of it. Dale is seeing it at the same time. Jo meets him afterward and asks what the serial was like. I tell her that at its best it was a lot like Quatermass. Jo does not know Quatermass. I ask her if she knew that what I consider the best science fiction film ever made is Quatermass and the Pit. She has been a friend all these years and I have never mentioned it.

Nigel Kneale wrote three very fine serials for the BBC in the 1950s. They were The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II, and Quatermass and the Pit. By the time the third one aired they were such a public phenomenon that churches were rescheduling services so people could see the chapters. Hammer Films of Britain made the movies The Quatermass Xperiment (sic, to exploit the X-certificate), Quatermass II. In the US these films were called The Creeping Unknown and Enemy From Space. About ten years later they made Quatermass and the Pit called in the US Five Million Years to Earth. The first two are good films, though Kneale hates Brian Donlevy's Quatermass. I saw Five Million Years to Earth in 1970 or 1971. I immediately dubbed this the best science fiction film I had ever seen. People considered me eccentric on the subject. Here was this science fiction film almost nobody in this country had ever seen and I kept telling people how great it was. In the 1990 it has gotten a much wider audience. The film now has its cult and generally discussions on the net assume that it is a first rank science fiction film.

1999

 

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Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and Red Dwarf are two fine examples of science fiction comedy but where are the next group of funny space people coming from?? Without comedy in space you don't have balance or rather the light and shade that makes a genre strong and vibrant!!! perhaps the new space comedy , Space Commander stone will fill the void and help us leap into the 21st century laughing our heads off while trying to steer a ship shaped like a giant finger with wings!!! I don't have the answer but Space Commander stones mission to uranus might be the one science fiction comedy to stop the year 2000 bug. It's at least worth checking out!!

 

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