Sky

I really thought i'd imagined or dreamt of a programme from the 1970's called SKY about an alien boy rising from the leaves in a forest, with very, very bright blue eyes... but the last time I looked was probably a couple of years ago I could only find a couple of references which were really vague ... but as it was made by Wales' 'local' TV station HTV, I thought there was little hope of ever seeing it again. However... prompted by Facebook quizzes, I looked again today and just found out it's being released in June 09. It does look like they have the whole series albeit with 2 episodes from another source. How cool is that?!!

http://www.networkdvd.net/product_info.php?products_id=887

In the 1970s, HTV cornered the market in quirky and bizarre fantasy half hours, always memorable, not always good. This oddity is fair, and concerns a beautiful blue-eyed blond alien with decidedly earthbound teeth who arrives on Earth at the wrong time and has to find his way to the right time zone. The Earth invokes a sort of immune system which tries to reject him, and he is pursued by the sinister Goodchild, who is perhaps a little too like a geography teacher to be wholly convincing as an avenging agent of nature. Sky's powers, and gradual loss of power, create a lot of tension, and Meredith Edwards lends a touch of class as the simple-minded Tom. Perhaps just too silly to be scary, a little too earnest to be eccentric, and with an unconvincing and predictable conclusion (you do not have to be tuned into the forces of the cosmos to work out what the Juganet is) it is still worth seeing, and all told it is not very much like anything else, which is an achievement for writers Baker and Martin.

Having looked for this for ages, I was delighted to be able to see it through the magic of the Internet recently.

Like most people, I saw it when I was a child and it made a big impression.

On viewing it now, being much older, the experience was a little disappointing, as was to be expected.

The episodes had very little pace, and the programme makers took incredible liberties with the cliffhangers, often showing something at the start of the episode that wasn't there at the end of the previous one! Sky himself was still as eerie as I remembered, and the use of CSO on his eyes and hands was still effective.

It was a true Friends of the Earth parable, however, and, given that I'm not exactly a supporter of greenie, eco-friendly, anti-science bull, this grated on me.

Only one moment in the series sent a shiver up my spine... when Goodchild was going up the stairs, with the camera focused on his feet, and you saw his creepy cloak just kind of drop into shot, where it hadn't been before!... ooh! All in all, could have done with being 6 episode long instead of 7.

DVD release seems unlikely due to the fact that episodes 3 and 7 only exist in ropey off-air recordings from a domestic Philips 1500 VCR.

There's a definite reluctance to release material in low quality.

Catch it if you can, though, through other methods :)

Let's be honest, there's a lot of dross on television at the moment. In a land of the crazy, the sane are mad - perhaps. But in the 1970's there were innovative programs - even on children's television. And this, Sky, was the best - hence my 10 out of 10 rating.

Marc Harrison, as the time traveller, was outstanding, with amazing blue eyes which the extremely new special effects emphatically delivered. The theme of the series - an alien presence disrupting nature, causing it to revolt, was an apt precursor to HIV and its effect on anti-bodies and Covid, which similarly caused horrendous problems, agitating defensive mechanisms within the body, causing severe illness and death.

I'm not sure the writers foresaw all of these things, but their excellent scenario of nature fighting an unnatural presence, was an amazing and precise precursor.

Marc Harrison in the lead role is superb, sensual, vulnerable, preoccupied with problems of his age and situation, Stuart Lock and Cherrald Butterfield as the teenagers who help him, are equally good.

I missed the last episode in 1975 and have only just viewed it, now the series is available on dvd. Sure, it's dated, but as an ambitious foretaste of things to come unless we change our ways, it is unsurpassed. True, Denis Potter wrote great plays, Out of the Unknown was a super 1969's/70's series and contemporary green background special effects make Sky look somewhat anachronistic, but the essence of the series, the conflict between an interloper and nature, the destruction of most of the human race during the chaos and search for the famous, inimitable Juganet (I asked about it in a pub last night) with its' ultimate discovery at Stonehenge, is imaginative and awesome.

Sky is a unique, fabulous, prediction-laden series which Nostradamus may not have mentioned, but we should never forget.

I thought this was great fun. I only heard of it recently and accidentally and am astonished it exists. The title character is a cosmic traveller gone astray; his look is a cross between David Bowie and Jesus Christ - his spiel too, albeit with a touch of steely ruthlessness, amoral survival instinct and the anger of Jesus with the moneylenders - and he's destined to become a god. But he doesn't belong in this time and place so he's attacked by Nature itself - vines and leaves and winds and a sinister human incarnation of it. It's inventive and intelligent and properly creepy and eerie at times. I don't want to spoiler the various neat touches and good developments, but to give you a taste one episode features an excellent sort of were-crow almost as a throwaway bit. It starts off quite good and gets better and wilder as it goes on. But if you can't get along with 70s special effects, forget it.