Out of The Unknown - Series Three

Series Three

Further information: List of series three episodes

Shubik was in the middle of her third trip to New York in early 1967 when she received a call from Sydney Newman offering her the opportunity to co-produce, with Graeme McDonald, BBC1's most prestigious drama slot, The Wednesday Play. Shubik accepted the new post but insisted that she be given time to commission a full series of Out of the Unknown scripts before moving on to The Wednesday Play and handing Out of the Unknown over to a new production team. At the same time, Michael Imison also moved on to produce Thirty Minute Theatre. Shubik went on to become a noted television producer of series such as Play for Today, Playhouse and Rumpole of the Bailey and instigated, but did not produce, the acclaimed adaptation of The Jewel in the Crown.

For series three, Shubik commissioned dramatisations of stories by Robert Sheckley (Immortality, Inc.); Isaac Asimov (Liar! and The Naked Sun (the sequel to The Caves of Steel which Shubik had dramatised for Story Parade in 1963)); John Brunner (The Last Lonely Man); Clifford D. Simak (Beach Head and Target Generation); John Wyndham (Random Quest); Cyril M. Kornbluth (The Little Black Bag); Rog Phillips (The Yellow Pill) and Peter Phillips (Get Off My Cloud). Original stories were provided by Donald Bull (“Something in the Cellar”), Brian Hayles (“1+1=1.5”) and Michael Ashe (“The Fosters”). Two scripts, “The Yellow Pill” and “Target Generation”, had previously been used in Shubik's earlier anthology series Out of this World.

In September 1967, Alan Bromly and Roger Parkes were appointed as the new producer and script editor respectively. Bromly and Parkes both had a background in thriller series. With all the scripts already commissioned, Bromly and Parkes' role was mainly to shepherd them through production.

Series three – the first Out of the Unknown series to be made in colour – was broadcast on Wednesday nights beginning on 7 January 1969 with the episode, “Immortality, Inc.”. One viewer of “Immortality, Inc.” was Beatle George Harrison who can be seen discussing the episode with Ringo Starr on the film Let It Be. Scheduled opposite the very popular ITV drama series The Power Game, the series suffered in the ratings and met with mixed reviews; the Daily Express found the series “most erratic”, sometimes “wonderfully inventive” but at other times “as silly as a comic strip in a child's magazine”. The production of “Random Quest” led its author, John Wyndham, to write to director Christopher Barry praising “the hard work and ingenuity of a great number of people concerned excellent work by everybody – not forgetting the adapter. My thanks to everyone for weaving it all together so skillfully”. “Beach Head” was entered into the Sixth Festival Internazionale del Film di Fantascienza in July 1968, in the hope of repeating the earlier success of “The Machine Stops”, but did not win.