MICHAEL HERBERT discusses COUNTERSTRIKE.

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on September 29th 2024.

This week the historian MICHAEL HERBERT returns to talk about another obscure piece of television science-fiction. This time, it’s a nine-part series, which seems to have been largely forgotten about, made by the BBC in 1969 after being first proposed in 1966 then shelved because of its similarity to a little American show called THE INVADERS.

It’s called COUNTERSTRIKE and, like a handful of other series from that era, involves an alien invasion of the earth by stealth, and the series tells exciting stories about what our heroes are doing to combat this deadly threat to the world.

SIMON KING is a benevolent member of a different alien species who are keen - for some reason - to protect humanity, and his sidekick, a nurse who he meets up with in the opening episode, because she becomes fascinated by his strange biology, is named MARY.

Film Actor JON FINCH played KING, and SARAH BRACKETT played MARY, in a series that, with an exciting opening title sequence typical of the action/adventure series of the time, promised much, but somehow failed to deliver, at least as far as we can tell from what survives of it.

Ten 50-minute black and white episodes were made, in the “videotape with film inserts studio-based” style of the times, and nine of these were broadcast, with the other episode scheduled but never shown. These days, of the ten, only the first four episodes remain in the archives (which is more than some series of similar vintage of course), and they are yet to get any kind of official commercial media release.

Luckily, if you know how, it is possible to view the episodes, and MICHAEL and I were able to do so (mainly because I was able to borrow the copies he had access to), but at this did mean that we could at least talk about the programmes with a certain amount of informed insight.

PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.