Journey Into Space

Written and created by Charles Chilton, the very first Journey Into Space episode was broadcast on the BBC Light Programme in September 1953, just a month after the concluding episode of the very first Quatermass serial on television.

Starring Andrew Faulds as Jet Morgan, the first eighteen-part series, simply titled Journey Into Space, involved the first manned mission to the moon. The other members of Luna's crew were Stephen Mitchell (Bruce Beeby / Don Sharp), the designer of the craft; Lemmy Barnett (David Kossoff), radio operator; and Doc Matthews (Guy Kingsley Poynter), the ship's Doctor.

Unsurprisingly, all did not go well with the mission and the crew of Luna soon found themselves stranded on the moon, with no power and seemingly no hope of returning home. Needless to say, the crew of Luna did eventually return from their historic journey, but only after a trip back in time and an encounter with a mysterious spacecraft...

The popularity of the series was such that a second run of twenty episodes was commissioned under the title The Red Planet. This second serial, as may be guessed from the title, saw a trip to Mars. But this time it wasn't just the single craft that was dispatched — it was a fleet of seven, with our heroes from the first story forming the crew of the Discovery. As usual, things took a twist when several ships were lost and a planned Martian invasion of Earth was uncovered. The series ended with the survivors of the Martian expedition making their way home to warn of the planned invasion.

The World in Peril, which began in September 1955, took up the plot from the conclusion of the preceding story, with the Earth under threat of invasion and the crew of Discovery being Earth's only hope. This series saw Don Sharp replacing Bruce Beeby as Mitch, with Alfie Bass replacing David Kossoff as Lemmy.

That wasn't the end of the Journey Into Space saga, however. In 1958 the first story was re-made as Operation Luna, to enable the whole series to be sold abroad as a trilogy. Yet again there was a change to the cast, with David Williams replacing Don Sharp, in the process becoming the third person to play Mitch.

Apart from a comic strip and novelisations of the three stories, this was the last that was to be heard of Journey Into Space until the production of The Return from Mars in March 1981, which saw the crew of Discovery making their way home after the events of The World in Peril.

Since then, the whole series (apart from what was unceremoniously edited out...) has been released on audio cassette, with Operation Luna and The Red Planet being re-broadcast again on BBC Radio 2 in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A documentary looking at the series was produced for Radio 4 in the 1990s and this was subsequently released on cassette to accompany the release of The Return from Mars and on the CD releases of Operation Luna. More recently, the entire trilogy has been broadcast on BBC7/BBC Radio 4 Extra, the BBC's digital radio station devoted to comedy and drama.

Operation Luna was finally released unedited on CD in 2004, in a box set that also included the documentary and the only existing segment from the original production. The Red Planet followed in 2005, with poor sales being cited as the reason for The World in Peril only being made available as a download. Fortunately for fans of the series, all three stories were released on CD in mid-2011, with the belated World in Peril release also including The Return from Mars.

Rather unexpectedly, news emerged in February 2008 that Charles Chilton had penned a one-off episode of Journey Into Space that would pick up the story after the conclusion of The Return from Mars. The sixty-minute Frozen in Time was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in The Saturday Play slot on 12 April, 2008, with David Jacobs taking on the role of Jet Morgan. The story proved successful enough for yet another tale to follow in June 2009, when Julian Simpson's The Host was broadcast on the same station — the first Journey Into Space radio story not to have been written by Charles Chilton.