The Andromeda Breakthrough | |
---|---|
Genre | Sci-Fi Serial |
Directed by | John Elliot (Eps 1,3,5) John Knight (Eps 2,4,6) |
Starring | Peter Halliday Susan Hampshire John Hollis Mary Morris |
Country of origin | Great Britain |
No. of episodes | 6 |
Production | |
Producer(s) | John Elliot |
Running time | 6x45 Minutes |
Broadcast | |
Original channel | BBC |
Original run | 28 June – 2 August 1962 |
The Andromeda Breakthrough was a 1962 sequel to the popular BBC TV science fiction serial A for Andromeda, again written by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot.
Kidnapped by Intel, John Fleming (Peter Halliday) the hero of the first serial, and Andromeda the artificially constructed human (this time played by Susan Hampshire as Julie Christie was unavailable) are brought to Azaran, a small Middle Eastern country, where a duplicate of the machine he designed has been built by Intel. After many dangers he finds both the reason for the original message having been sent and the means to bring the machine under human control.
The complete TV serial survives in the BBC archives and was released, alongside the surviving material from A for Andromeda and various extra features, as part of The Andromeda Anthology DVD set in 2006.
Hoyle and Elliot's novelisation was published by Harper and Row in 1964, as Andromeda Breakthrough by arrangement with the BBC, and paperback editions followed from Fawcett World Library (1965) in USA and Corgi (1966) in Britain. Judith Merril reported that although the novelisation suffered from "routine writing, stereotyped characters, and an apparent belief in the Ian Fleming school of international intrigue," the scientists-protagonists were "anything but stereotyped," and "a fair cross-section of the kinds of people who are attracted to scientific work." Merril concluded that the cliched elements "provide a reasonably amusing background to a genuinely intriguing scientific puzzle."[1]