Pathfinders to Mars

The story of the first humans on Mars appeared shortly after Pathfinders in Space took our heroes to the Moon. This series is a vast improvement on the first serial, largely by giving us a villain, in the shape of George Coulouris, probably wondering how he had progressed from Citizen Kane to this. The script and plot are tighter, and there is some genuine drama and conflict.

It was sensible to reduce the numbers of children, though Geoff remains as pompous a child as ever flew into space - in his actions and diction, remarkably like Burt Ward's Robin in the US Batman series (except that was played for laughs).

This was an utterly naïve series - especially when compared with the radio Journey Into Space, which appeared seven years before, and which it aspires to imitate. How seriously you take it depends on how you react to the situation in episode 1 - the captain of a rocket breaks his arm a few hours before take-off, and so it is proposed to replace him with a journalist who happens to be passing. Said journalist will only go if his niece comes with him, as he is babysitting, he promised to take her fishing and she would be disappointed. It's OK, as the captain was already taking his teenaged son. No-one seems to mind that, with only a few hours to go, the crew of the ship has increased from four to five. To cap it all, the final member of the crew is late, and only turns up ten minutes before launch, so he is rushed on board without anyone checking that he is not the tall, young Australian with a full head of hair that everyone expects, but in fact a short, fat, bald loony. If you think that is a plausible set of events, then perhaps it is lucky that the British never had a space programme of their own.

A rocket to the Moon is hijacked and diverted to Mars by a writer obsessed with proving that there is intelligent life on the Red Planet. Much of the 'Pathfinders in Space' cast returns including Gerald Flood as journalist Conway Henderson (who is now commanding the lunar mission), Stewart Guidotti as young Geoffrey Wedgwood (sans sister and brother, who serves as radio expert), Pamela Barney as Canadian lunar-expert Prof. Mary Meadows, and Hamlet the guinea pig. Newcomers include Hester Cameron as Henderson's young niece Margaret (replacing Geoff's kid-sister and -brother) and George Coulouris as the slightly unhinged, possibly villainous, Harcourt Brown (by far the most interesting character and the one on whom the 'hijacking' plot hangs). The six episode series was intended to teach science while it entertained, so there are discussions of 'departure windows' based on the relative movements of Mars and Earth, of the possibility of life on Mars (an on-going debate in the early 1960s), of the famous 'channels: canals' mistranslation that inspired many fictional depictions of dying Martian civilizations, of the time delay of radio signals travelling from Earth to Mars and back, and of using the Sun's gravitational field to accelerate a spaceship that otherwise had insufficient fuel to reach its destination (a particularly sophisticated concept for a kid's show). Realism in the plot was less of a priority: journalist Henderson is chosen to replace the mission commander with essentially no training, Brown easily sneaks into a military base and passes himself off as a member of a rocket crew, and (most egregiously) stranded astronauts can essentially decipher a completely alien language and master completely alien technologies in a matter of hours. Margaret serves little purpose beyond being someone with whom the youthful target audience can relate but ironically, as a study done in 'Pathfinders to Venus' (the 1962 follow-up to this adventure) demonstrated, even young children are skeptical that kids would be on-board the first rockets into space. The budget was increased compared to its predecessor and the props (other than the ridiculous 'lichen'), miniatures and special effect are better (although still rudimentary compared to contemporaneous American kid sci-fi shows such as 'Rocky Jones'). A great show to watch through the lens of nostalgia but first timers (like me) should enjoy it as well (as long as they keep in mind that this is a 60 year-old, low-budget, ostensibly educational, children's space opera made for the BBC). As of this writing, all episodes can be found on-line (but #6 may be misidentified as a non-existent #7).