THAT ’50S SHOW
The Quanderhorn Xperimentations promises to take science fiction back to the 1950s
We liked the idea of going back to a simpler and fantastic time
Imagine a Great Britain where the 1950s are still happening. Where an experiment, back in 1952, freezeframed time – Winston Churchill is still Prime Minister, Doctor Who has yet to be created and rationing is still in force.
That’s the unique premise of a new comedy series from Rob Grant (Red Dwarf) and Andrew Marshall (2Point4 Children) that debuts on BBC Radio 4 this June. The Quanderhorn Xperimentations stars James Fleet (The Vicar Of Dibley) as an enigmatic, morally dubious scientist whose messed up experiments has stuck Britain in a 1950s time-loop.
“It’s impossible to describe in a nutshell,” Grant tells Red Alert, “but there’s definitely an Indiana Jones Saturday morning serial vibe to it. We wanted to do something retro.”
Both Grant and Marshall grew up on a diet of 1950s SF classics including This Island Earth, Attack Of The 50 Ft Woman, The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Quatermass Experiment. These now inform the show.
“We felt that modern science fiction is sort of based on realism now because so many things that were science fiction are now real,” says Marshall. “We liked the idea of going back to a simpler and more fantastic time where you really could have phone calls from the future or weird things happening on the moon.”
Filling out the cast are Ryan Sampson (Plebs) as the fabulously named Brian Nylon, Kathy Layton as the half-clockwork Dr Gemini Jannussen, Kevin Eldon (Big Train) as the team’s Martian hostage Guuuurk the Magnificent, impressionist John Sessions as the Professor’s arch-nemesis Winston Churchill and Freddie Fox (“from the great acting dynasty,” says Grant) as the Professor’s part-human, part-insect “son”. “Quanderhorn describes him as ‘a major breakthrough in artificial stupidity’,” teases Grant.
Also released in June is a tie-in novelisation penned by the pair that promises a deeper, more serious take on the Quanderhorn story.
“It isn’t that one is an adaptation of the other,” says Marshall. “If you listen to the radio version and you read the book in parallel, you can’t tell if the radio is a simplified version of the book or the book is an elaborated version of the radio. Each fertilised the other until we had two different aspects of the same thing.”
But radio remains, it seems, the deeper love for Grant and Marshall. Both began their careers on Radio 4 (Grant co-wrote the sketch show Son Of Cliche and the sitcom Wrinkles, while Marshall co-created the sketch show The Burkiss Way) and they remain fans of the medium. “You can have the most fantastic contraptions on radio,” says Grant. “And the audience is much more collaborative – they bring something to the show. Instead of CGI, we have MGI – Mental Generated Imagery!”
The Quanderhorn Xperimentations comes to BBC Radio 4 in late June.