I can’t believe that anyone actually remembers Space Precinct, the 1994 sci-fi series I co-produced with Gerry Anderson, let alone that it has any legacy, other than grey hairs on my head and a big red loss on the books of our backers.
My son Ben accompanied me: he was 13 when he came to the set and met Gerry Anderson's son Jamie, who was then just 10. Now they're both around thirty, yet at the premiere they reminisced with excitement about diving into the props store and sitting in the flying police cars in the studio.
10 years before, he’d filmed a pilot that nobody wanted to buy, about a retired New York cop called Brogan who was sent to Demeter City on the planet Altor to sort out their crime wave – a kind of Law & Order with aliens. The criminals wore prosthetics masks with animatronic eyeballs and bled green blood. So did Brogan’s alien police colleagues. It was a hoot.
I’d recently won my one and only drama Emmy and I was keen to get into fiction big time, so I agreed to become Gerry’s business partner. A small distributor in America claimed to have a rich backer who would fund the entire $36million budget, the most expensive series ever made in the UK, so we set Gerry up at Pinewood, and started production.

But it nearly didn’t get made at all. And I very nearly went bankrupt. We’d made a little taster, using Gerry’s original pilot and some extra scenes shot at Pinewood, and I took it a big television conference in New Orleans, where I’d been invited to a pitching competition. It was worse than any episode of The X-Factor. The judges were top broadcasters – Greg Dyke played Simon Cowell.
The previous pitchers were in tears, their projects destroyed. Greg tried to do the same to ours: no-one will buy this show, he declared to the audience of 2000 television executives.
There was silence. Then a man in the middle of the hall put up his hand: “My name is Kloiber; I wish to buy this series for Germany – I will pay $100,000 per episode”.
Cheers rang round the hall. Other buyers put up their hands. We were in production within a week.
But the drama didn’t end there. For, shortly after we’d finished the first episode, the American money dried up. We ploughed on as my overdraft grew to nearly £2million.
A planeload of black-suited lawyers arrived from America to shut us down. They said the distributor had conned them, the mystery backer knew nothing about the show: he had been swindled.
With aliens being shot by rayguns in the studio next door, I produced a single fax message from the backer, proving that he and his company knew all about it. It was the only proof I had.
They adjourned the meeting, and returned 2 hours later with a cheque for £2million and a contract.
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Me and an Alien Friend |
It’s no wonder some of the crew interviewed for the documentary felt ambivalent about the result. It wasn’t exactly their finest hour, or Anderson’s or mine.
But we survived, and several of the team went on to fame and fortune with big movies like James Bond. So perhaps there is a legacy of Space Precinct after all.
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