A for Andromeda

Following instructions transmitted from the Andromeda Galaxy, John Fleming (Peter Halliday) builds a highly advanced computer that in turn creates synthetic lifeforms, including Andromeda (Julie Christie) a beautiful clone of Christine, a recently deceased scientist (also played by Christie). The computer and the clone are embraced by the government when they prove themselves capable of advancing Britain's military capabilities to the global forefront while Fleming begins to fear that the alien machine and its gynoid have ulterior motives. Sadly, most of this early BBC science fiction teleplay has been lost, leaving only stills (which encompass much of the series) and episode six of the original seven. The story, written in part by astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, is intriguing, especially considering that radioed instructions from Andromeda would take a minimum of 2.5 million years to get here, suggesting that if aliens are planning on colonising Earth, they are playing a very, very long game. Julie Christie is quite good in the titular role, but Halliday is less impressive and the scenes where he is trying to 'awaken the woman' in the passionless blonde simulacrum are weak (but foreshadow Captain Kirk's numerous attempts to elicit similar emotional epiphanies in Star Trek (1966)). The initial premise and first episodes are great, but the story drifts into a routine industrial espionage yarn and the final act is a bit predictable (although perhaps less so back in 1961). Although not as good (IMO) as the BBC's previous sci-fi teleplays (the three excellent Quatermass series), 'A for Andromeda' was sufficiently popular to warrant a sequel ('The Andromeda Breakthrough' (1962)). Unfortunately the BBC had neglected to put Christie under contract and, as the star was filming her breakthrough role on 'Billy Liar' (1963), she was no longer available for low-budget sci-fi shows to be shown on the telly. The version I recently watched on-line was a well-done ~150 minute annotated compilation of producer Michael Haye's 'telesnaps', some video fragments, and the intact sixth chapter. Worth watching for genre aficionados as well as anyone interested in the history of the BBC or British sci-fi in general.

As a 12 year old, my parents considered it inappropriate for me to watch this nonsense, so I didn't get to see every episode when it first came out, and I had to content myself with reading the novelisation of "A4A" and its sequel "Andromeda Breakthrough". I'd heard that the BBC had destroyed all the prints (of A4A) although some episodes had been recovered, "The Face of the Tiger" (Ep 6) in its entirety.

So imagine my complete and utter amazement when yesterday I saw that the BBC was releasing both serials on DVD. I hied myself down the video shop this morning and lo and behold there they were. Sadly the missing episodes were still missing but using a technique called "Telesnap" which had involved somebody sitting in front of their TV taking a still photograph every time something interesting appeared on screen, and inserting captions taken from the script the entire story was reconstructed. There were also some short excerpts gained from various sources which were inserted.

The last two episodes were virtually complete.

So, I was introduced to (the late) Sir Fred Hoyle and his sometimes eccentric but always entertaining writing by this TV series, and a much wider world, so bless you Sir Fred.

It also inspired me with an almost fanatical dedication to computers that even as a 12 year old I wanted to own one. I bought my first one (Apple II) in 1979, and in 2007 I have them lying all over the floor and hanging on shelves.

Having finished watching the entire "A4A" and one episode of "Breakthrough", despite having had the novels since 1964 or so, I'm amazed how relevant the storyline and its ideas are. Genetic engineering. Human cloning. Climate change. Exploration, subjugation and even destruction of a foreign species by remote means. Tissue regeneration. Computers "taking over everything". Biological warfare. Middle Eastern oil!!! "Third World" nations becoming electronic sweatshops to increase their economic wealth. The list goes on.

The plot? It's almost exactly the same as "Contact" with Jodie Foster (or to be more pedantic, vice-versa). A radio telescope picks up a signal from space, it's decoded into a design for a "super computer", with a program and data. The computer starts working out what makes the earthlings tick. It creates a mass of protoplasm with an eye which enables the computer to see what's going on around it. Eventually the computer kills a girl and reads her DNA, then clones her, but she's actually part of the computer. And then the fun REALLY starts. interstellar/interspecies love story. World domination. Security of one nation's air space from hostile intrusion and threat.

The cast? First and foremost, the absolutely unbelievable Julie Christie in her first appearance in front of the camera. Although deliberately given a very limited emotional range to work within (she plays the protoplasmic computer) she is stunning both in looks, her icy menace and eventual (unintended) human frailty. (Susan Hampshire plays Andromeda in the Breakthrough and has a very difficult job to fill Jules' shoes - but she gives it a damned good go).

Peter Halliday as the rebellious but brilliant (probably unstable) physicist who tries to warn all and sundry of the danger.

Mary Morris as Madelaine Dawnay, the biologist who "creates" Andromeda.

I know almost every word by heart from reading the novels, but this DVD release gives me a refreshing re-view of this timeless classic.

Trivia: Julie Christie's character is created by a computer. In Demon Seed she is impregnated by a computer. Does she have a thing for electronic sex?

Another beloved time-capsule for "fossils" such as myself who walked the earth in what must seem quasi-Jurassic times now - the early sixties. The Beatles with Stu Sutcliffe were still in Hamburg, Arnold Schwarzenegger was 12, Steven Bradley had just been convicted in Australia of the murder of 8 year-old Graeme Thorne and I was about to sit for my final school exams.

Like half of Britain I watched the opening episode of this eagerly awaited and promoted sci-fi series which promised everything and delivered perhaps 50%. Problem was, it screened not long after QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, a totally impossible act to follow!

Long before the inauguration of S.E.T.I. (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) A FOR ANDROMEDA concerned itself with the discovery of a radio emission from the Andromeda galaxy that appeared to be a blue-print for creating life itself. (Not too much was made of DNA double-helixes and the like in 1961). This pitted scientists Dr John Fleming (Halliday) and Professor Madeleine Dawnay Morris) against one another, since neither were sure of the moral, social or scientific implications of pursuing the seeming opportunity. Naturally, stupidity won out and a being was created. Does this all sound rather familiar? Yes folks, SPECIES was a total conceptual rip-off....and no-one ever noticed!

The 'being' however (Andromeda, as she was named) was one awesomely pretty and excessively young Julie Christie, in her first screen role (It catapulted her to international success in just a few years). As always happens. the authorities fear what they don't know and Miss Christie was soon very much in harms way, much like Natasha Henstridge in SPECIES thirty five years later.

This was never GREAT sci-fi as it was way too talky and a tad low on action. However, the concluding episodes WERE good and if this exists anywhere on video in an abridged form even, it would be well worth a look, if only to see why Julie Christie broke so many hearts, one of which was Stanley Kubrick's....but that is another story!

I first watched this TV series when I was nine years old, it terrified me, especially the scenes when "andromeda" gripped the bars and seemingly was electrocuted. I carried the images with me to school the next day and tried to engage anybody who had seen it to see if they felt as scared as me. Through IMDb I have been able to revisit the essence of the production (actors, director) A stunningly "realistic" production for it's time. I have rarely been genuinely affected by small or silver screen but " A for Andromeda" remains in my memory 45 years later, and I had no idea that the yet to be great Julie Christie was Andromeda. Does anybody have remotely the same memories as me?

John Carr

This was a very poorly made sci fi series which was of enormous historical importance because of its central ideas, which came from joint author Sir Fred Hoyle, the famous cosmologist and astrophysicist. When this series was broadcast on the BBC in 1961, twelve million viewers were glued to their screens. They did not notice the cheap sets, bad direction by Michael Hayes, corny story lines, inferior camera work, or terrible performance by Julie Christie as the character Andromeda, who was fresh out of the Central School of Speech and Drama because rumour had it that she might 'become the British Bardot'. No, none of these things deterred them. Because what they were gripped by (apart from Julie Christie being glamorous, whether she could act or not at that stage of her career being immaterial to the lustful) was Hoyle's idea that a signal might be received from intelligent beings on a planet in another galaxy, in this case, the Andromeda Galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 31, two million light years away. In the story, this signal is detected and it turns out to contain a message which is decoded and leads to the construction of a super-computer. The message continues and, using the computer, it instructs biochemist Madeleine Dawnay (who in the novel had been a man but was changed into a woman for the series), excellently played by Mary Morris, how to make a living creature with a single eye which lives in a tank as a kind of palpitating lump of protoplasm. This clearly isn't good enough, so a secretary named Christine (played by Julie Christie in a black wig) is killed by the computer and 'replicated' into a fabricated humanoid, whom they call Andromeda, who is Julie Christie with her white-blonde hair of that period of her life. They actually mention that the computer got the hair wrong. (As far as I could determine when I briefly knew her in later life, Julie's hair was naturally a rather dark blonde. And, by the way, she is a charming and interesting person, and very far from being just a humanoid.) Christie was instructed to speak in a monotone and act like an automaton, so this partially explains her performance, of course. After all, she was supposed to be a fabricant under the control of a computer. Enter a young heroic scientist played by Peter Halliday, who does very well throughout this series and its sequel (see my separate review of it), 'The Andromeda Breakthrough'. Halliday, like Hoyle, is a rebel who hates authority and insists on thinking for himself. He has to run the computer, and Julie Christie gets him all romantically excited, when he isn't worried that she is trying to destroy humanity. Now I have to explain that, as the BBC has always contained a great number of morons on the payroll, most of this series does not exist anymore because it was 'wiped', as so much important early material was by the in-house thickos. One entire episode survives, as well as the last fifteen minutes of the final episode, and bits and pieces of the rest. The remainder of the series is 're-created' by stills and narration, so one gets a good idea of it. A great deal of work went into this, and the series is for sale in the same DVD (set of three discs) with its sequel and a documentary of 'Andromeda Memories'. It is a pity that it does not also include the astronomical documentary presented by Fred Hoyle of which brief clips appear in the 'Memories'. What this series is really all about is Fred's provocative thinking and his genius. I knew him pretty well, and everything he ever wrote or touched was original, stimulating, and magnificently brilliant. He was one of the great scientific geniuses of twentieth century Britain. And he was a very unaffected and modest man, with a gruff Yorkshire accent and a one hundred percent straight talker. You always knew where you were with Fred, until he started writing down his equations, of course, and then he tended to leave everybody behind, because he could never understand that other people weren't as quick at math as he was. He should have shared Willie Fowler's Nobel Prize, since Fowler was Fred's junior partner in working out the production of chemical elements in the interiors of stars, but Fred was blackballed by the Nobel Committee and denied the chance to share the Prize since he had publicly criticized them in the press in earlier years. So watch out, if you ever want to win the Nobel Prize, never criticize the Nobel Committee publicly, as it is in their constitution that they can never give the Prize to anyone who has attacked them. But for all those who knew Fred and know his work, he 'won it' really, because his work was awarded the Prize even if he individually was not. The preservation of what is left of this TV series is a worthy addition to Fred's legacy.