Code A

Hello, Max here. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been here on the read worthy web page that is the Media Museum blog, so here’s Terry with his amazing show “Code A”

From Terry Bland -

It was the far off future of 1998, tinfoil was in abundance as were rayguns that looked like hairdryers and alien landscapes that looked like quarries. Our hero was Space Agent John Granger, on a mission to investigate extraterrestrial incursions on earth and beyond, designated Code A incidents. The A stood for Alien because, in the early seventies, I was gripped by the UFO phenomenon, having read Erich von Daniken’s ‘Chariot of the Gods’. The compelling account of ancient astronauts coming to our planet, building the pyramids, posing as gods and in general, mucking about.

The creation of Code A began with a mixture of serendipity and inebriation. In 1972, I found myself at Gareth Hunt’s thirtieth birthday party, quite uninvited and quite unsure of how I’d got there. However, I helped myself to the sausage rolls and quiche, quaffed a fair deal of Blue Nun and was making a great big, hairy tit of myself. Gareth was quite angry and threatened to throw me out. ‘You can’t throw me out’, I declared, ‘you’re not the police. You’re just a . . .’. I had no idea what he was, so I narrowed my eyes, pointed at him and said slowly, ‘What are you?’

‘I’m an actor’, he growled, ‘now get out before I break your legs.’

A flash of skin-saving inspiration broke through the drunkenness. ‘An actor! Of course you are. You’re the man Lew sent me to see. I’ve come to offer you the lead role in a new ITC action show.’

Gareth grinned, patted me on the back and offered me another glass of gloopy wine, ‘Well , why didn’t you say so?,’ he said, ‘What’s the story?’

I went on to explain that it was a science fiction adventure show. He would be an intergalactic James Bond, named John Granger, the finest agent of the Cosmic Intelligence Bureau, tasked with investigating the increase in alien visitations. The CIB suspect that these visits are the precursor to an invasion. And it’s all set in 1998 where everything’s all silver and futuristic.

‘What about the fanny?’ he asked.

‘You’ll be up to your elbows in it,’ I replied before spending the rest of the night being paraded around the room, forced to make up more and more of the story as I went along.

Fortunately for me I’d recently written and produced Countess Bonkula’s Reform School for Ghouls, one of the many big hits that had starred my wife Babs. It was a generous serving of spooky sauciness set in a girls’ boarding school and Lew Grade had loved it. I was quick on the phone to him and pitched Code A. ‘I had’, I said, ‘the perfect actor for the role. He’s young, he’s suave, he’s cheap.’

And so work began on the sci-fi spectacular. We hired a quarry, painted it green and got Gareth to run around pointing a hairdryer at various extras in monster suits. I wouldn’t want you to think it was all mindless action though. We used the fantasy setting to tell serious stories, fables, maybe even parables about what it means to be human. Our hero was driven by the carefully constructed backstory I’d written on a napkin from the Little Chef near Wrexham. His wife and son had been abducted during an archaeological dig in Mexico while trying to prove that ancient structures were in fact alien spaceports. Our first episode opened with Space Agent Granger receiving the news and vowing his revenge. Here we achieved a slice of verité. We’d hidden Gareth’s egg sandwich and told him we didn’t have time to get him another and that we had to start shooting straightaway. Gareth went into a rage, sweeping futuristic equipment from Granger’s desk in CIB central office, smashing stuff to pieces and tearing up his script, before sinking to his knees sobbing, ‘Why God!? Why?!’

We all laughed and applauded as the runner handed our star his egg sandwich. Gareth didn’t see the funny side of it though and, while the first aiders tended to the runner, took a great deal of calming down as I tried to persuade him not to quit.

To counter Granger’s heroics we needed a villain and for this I turned to my old friend Morty Vicker. Morty’s double act, Vicker and Tart, had dissolved when poor old Kenny Tart had realised that his wife hadn’t actually got a gambling problem. She had claimed at first to be down the dog track of an evening, then at the bookies during the day, before eventually telling poor Kenny that she needed regular Gambler’s Anonymous meetings. She couldn’t, she argued, tell him where the meetings where because, well, that wouldn’t be very anonymous, would it? However, it turned out that she’d never had a flutter in her life and that the only thing she’d ever had both ways was Morty.

So Morty needed a job and was more than willing to don a monster suit to play Snood, leader of the Clagnauts, an alien race bent on ruling the galaxy. The scheming Snood always had his pre-invasion operations foiled by Space Agent Granger, forcing him to come up with ever increasing dastardly plots. My favourite was in episode four – ‘Foreign Tongue.’

The Clagnauts planned to enslave the human race using hypnosis hidden on a range of language LPs named Insta-Ling. And who better to be the voice committed to vinyl, instructing the world to tear itself apart, than John Granger himself. The episode opened with a half naked Gareth Hunt strapped to a bed onboard Snood’s mothership. Tubes and wires protruded from his body, while atop his head was a colander fitted with flashing LEDs restructuring his brain to serve the Clagnauts. Snood gloats and then we cut to the title sequence complete with futuristic computer voice and stunning synth sounds, all while shots of Gareth in action as Granger are being shown. We see him rolling on the floor with a ray gun, diving from an explosion in a quarry, laughing with an awkward robot and smiling seductively at a lady.

In this episode we really got to see Gareth’s range as he waged a psychic battle against alien mind control. He even had a possessed hand at one point and tried to strangle himself. Very dramatic! As were the scenes in the recording studio when he was doing the Insta-Ling thing. I was impressed with his ability to tackle a number of different tongues, although when he tried his hand with the Dutch he did come over a little German.

As always our hero managed to ruin Snood’s plans and was soon back to his old self, for the final round of fisticuffs in a quarry. I remember it was a scorching hot day, the kind that makes pasty yobs wander the streets with no tops on while clutching a can of Woodpecker to their ultra-white, man-titted chests. No wonder Clive Dunn emigrated. So, it was a roaster and Snood was engaged in a bit of verbal sparring with Granger as his henchmen did their ineffectual sub-karate fighting. Morty had moaned to me earlier that he was getting too hot in his monster suit and that he could barely breath in his mask. I ignored him, remembering the great footage I got from Gareth when he got irate. This time though, it was a mistake. The glue in Morty’s monster mask heated up, the fumes sending him quite mad and setting him off on a one-man rampage. In fact, he managed to get on the evening news for tearing through a greasy spoon and threatening to shove a tomato-shaped novelty ketchup bottle up the owner’s nose. I thought, what with all the media coverage, that it was great publicity for the show. However, Lew disagreed and when he saw the bill for all the damage, along with what we’d already spent on the show, he pulled the plug.

There has been talk of a re-imagining of Code A for the twenty-first century, complete with war-on-terror metaphors, political intrigue and cheaper aliens that aren’t covered in toxic rubber but look just like humans to increase the paranoia levels in the plot. It’ll never work, of course, but I’ll be happy for them to have a go, if only for the royalty cheque.