Phoenix Five

This deserves a user review simply because it the only MEMORABLE Australian television series about a spaceship. In my 1970s childhood I was a huge fan of this series, the loud theme music with the cornball narrator talking over the music was almost enough to make it cool.

Thanks to YouTube, I have been able to re-visit this series in this century. In a B&W episode, the ship encounters fog and rain in space and it is these kind of moments that I like most as it resembles Lost In Space and Land Of The Giants. In fact, at first glance, the costumes and cockpit set do have a very Land Of The Giants-look to them. Which is cool. But from what I saw on YouTube, there was just way too much talk and not enough action. Maybe I need to see more?

In Australia, I heard that low budget Phoenix Five was screened at the same time as the big budget US series - Land Of The Giants - and this concerned the producers as kids would go for the bigger budget product. So Phoenix got a poor timeslot.

Since every old show comes to DVD, I guess this one deserves a DVD release as well, I would probably get it but not for too much money.

There are very few things I remember about this show. One of the things was the theme.... Which stuck in my head for no readily apparent reason. I can still hum it today, even though it has probably been 30 years since it has ever been seen by the public. Another was the apparently sparse sets requiring a lot of metaphorical plots.... Which they probably weren't, but that is all that still exists in the old brain.

I'd like to see this again, even if it is probably creakier than Doctor Who at its low-budget 60's zenith. I really want to know if these few scraps of memory were right.... It still exists in its entirety in the Australian Archives....

Amazed to see comments from others remembering this program, since even dedicated tube-heads of my acquaintance (some of them professionals !) don't recall this one. It must have a been a regional ITV distribution thing in the U.K. I can vouch for the fact that it was screened on Ulster Television (UTV) pre-1974 (though I'm not sure exactly when).

Unfortunately, my recollection of it extends to little more than the unforgettable title and that a solid part of its appeal lay in the fact that the titular ship was relatively easy to make from old cardboard toilet rolls. This belongs to a select group of T.V. shows ('Ace of Wands' and 'The Tomorrow People' spring to mind) that you could emulate and play outdoors - often on 'bicycling' spacecraft !

Another North-Easterner who remembers Tyne-Tees showing Phoenix Five. I don't think I was at school when it was on so we must be talking 1972-ish. Apparently everything concerning old tapes of P5 has been binned in Australia, but someone on a certain website that hosts old video clips claims to have 3 episodes on VHS. Here's hoping we may at least see something sometime. Yes it was wooden and cheap but certainly not nasty. On the face of it it looks like a carbon copy of Star Trek, but it had a better theme!! I too remember the heads that lit up when they talked...always taking the mickey out of the villain (Zodian?)

(Was the female presenter you mentioned Lyn Spencer???)

I remember this show from the early 1970's and would have been about 10 at the time.

I don't remember many of the details except that despite it not being as good as Doctor Who, Star Trek or Land Of The Giants, my other favourite shows at the time, I enjoyed it.

I'd love to see it again to find out if the sets and spaceship models really were as bad as I remember them, and if the plots were as silly. But then, isn't that half the fun. Don't we think the same thing when we watch the original Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers serials. The lack of any real knowledge of science, and poor special effects, overacting and any other similar complaint doesn't detract from the fact that it was fun for children.