by Roy Barton

Created on: April 15, 2008

Science fiction on television has always presented a challenge to those that have decided to venture into that field of entertainment.

Books and radio meant the reader and listener had to rely on their own imagination. The buying public funded the many cinema releases. Episodic storylines that ventured into the future or presented alternatives to the real world created a whole range of budgetary and creational problems.

Without doubt, science fiction can be the most rewarding of genres. The reliance on the person to suspend belief and allow them to be taken into an alternative universe will return the highest appreciation from the audience.

It must also be emphasised that those that believed in sending signals through the air-waves to provide radio and television signals must surely have been open to new and outlandish ideas.

Although we all take for granted the concept of television, for those that first witnessed it in the 1930's, an image just appearing on a screen in front of them, must have presented them with the very principle of science fiction. However, television was expensive, and science fiction was even more expensive to produce. Apart from a few one-off stories, a 1938 BBC production of a 1921 novel from a Czech author called Karel Capek entitled RUR (Rosumovi Umel Roboti, or Rossum's Universal Robots) being the very first television science fiction broadcast, there was very little, if any sci-fi on television.

In the 1950's, with costs becoming cheaper, the new wave of science fiction hit the small screen on both sides of the Atlantic. The BBC led the way with Quatermass, whilst the US was in the midst of produced epic, multi-episodic stories on shoe-string budgets. Buck Rogers (37 episodes) and Space Patrol (a massive 210 episodes) set the tone for the genre in that decade. Other legends introduced to the television included Flash Gordon and the Invisible Man.

In the sixties, the two legends of Doctor Who and Star Trek emerged. Both ultimately survived through the decades and maintain huge followings to this day. Gerry Anderson started featuring heavily with his own brand of animatronic puppet science-fiction, whilst Lost In Space tried to produce a sci-fi series without the need for producing new scenes and props for every episode, by basing it's storyline on the Swiss Family Robinson. Irwin Allen, the show-runner, also produced The Time Tunnel and Voyage to The Bottom of the Sea, making this decade one of the most colourful and exciting in the development

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