I love this old Pan paperback 1960 cover of the Red Planet. The story is by Charles Chilton and the cover, complete with Moon Bus and Task Force 2 - like vehicles, is by Glenn Stewart. Cool! This, Journey Into Space or Jet Morgan isn't a BBC series/character that I know but there's a modern graphical version of it online with the header shown below. Spot the blue Stingray lookalike and another Moon Busish vehicle! Anyone know the series? Is it radio?
Picture credit: BBC
JOURNEY INTO SPACE was a big BBC radio show back in the late 1950s/early 190s. I know little of it but my parents would often mention it when I was a kid in the late 1960s as I was such a Sci-Fi/Space mad child and told me I would have liked it. For a kid watching DR WHO, THUNDERBIRDS and LOST IN SPACE I doubt listening to the radio would have really appealed to me back then had they re-broadcast it but I am curious now as to how good it was. Think it may be on CD actually?
ReplyDeleteJim Lewis
BBC Radio 7 have just finished repeating the 1956 series "World In Peril" (the last five episodes are available on iPlayer) and have a 90 minute 1981 revival (from Saturday Night Theatre's SF season, IIRC) also up on iPlayer at the moment.
ReplyDeleteBoth are listed on iPlayer as Charles Chilton's Journey Into Space, though I don't think he went any further than Broadcasting House :) Chilton was the writer and producer of the radio series, which starred later MP Andrew Faulds and later DJ David Jacobs.
Journey into Space was featured as a strip cartoon in the 1950s Express Weekly comic, drawn by Italian artist Tacconi. There were also several stories in the Express annuals, at least one drawn by Bruce Cornwell.
ReplyDeleteThere were also 1950s books with covers by Ron Jobson, a very accomplished space artist, who also worked on the "Space Kingley" books in the 1950s, with fine artwork.
The stories were available on BBC tape, I assume they are also on CD.
While I have only heard isolated episodes, I found them very good.
Pretty sure they are on CD. I have recordings of them all somewhere as MP3s, but for the life of me I can't find them :(
ReplyDelete"Journey Into Space" by Charles Chilton was a radio series of the 1950s. It's been on BBC7's "Seventh Dimension" recently. All three serials, "Operation Luna", "The Red Planet", and "The World in Peril" are available as CD collections. Plenty of info available here:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_into_Space
including that cartoon strip, which was done recently for those box sets. There's links to the booklets included with the CDs on that Wikipaedia page, too!
I had a "Jet Morgan" space suit when I was a kid, in the early '60s. It had a pair of silver trousers, two red mittens, a silver top with a red triangle across the chest with "Jet Morgan" in cursive yellow script, and a cloth "helmet" with transparent plastic visor, more like an old flying helmet than a proper space helmet. Still, I loved it - an early piece of SF merchandising!
Grif