Since his death in 2012, the legacy of the great Gerry Anderson has been carefully curated and nurtured by his son Jamie under the banner of Anderson Entertainment, offering newly packaged releases of classic shows and a range of associated colourful merchandise. Although attempts to launch new projects based on Gerry’s many unrealised ideas have borne little fruit, Anderson Entertainment has been successfully developing existing properties via new audio, books and comic strips. Fans of Gerry’s 1970s live-action sci-fi adventures will be intrigued by the arrival of what will hopefully become a new range of novellas based on both UFO and Space:1999, the former in particular often championed as Anderson’s very best and most inventive series.
UFO: Shadowplay is a brisk 100-ish page yarn that takes us back to Gerry Anderson’s 1980 (the series was filmed in 1969/1970), where the Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation is fighting a war of attrition against a dying race of hostile aliens coming to Earth to harvest body parts. Inevitably, James Swallow’s story focuses on UFO’s most fascinating character – the steely, single-minded Commander Ed Straker (played so brilliantly on TV by the late Ed Bishop), a man who sacrificed a normal life so he could protect the Earth from SHADO’s underground headquarters beneath a film studio in Southern England. Here, Straker awakes from a voluntary session testing out a new psychotropic drug at SHADO HQ, only to start experiencing strange visions of a mysterious, shadowy being lurking in the corridors of the base. No one else can see the phantom figure. Straker becomes increasingly paranoid, convinced that the base has been infiltrated by an alien working to bring down the organisation from within. Meanwhile, Straker’s closest colleagues, Colonel Alec Freeman and Colonel Paul Foster, begin to suspect that SHADO’s Commander is on the verge of total breakdown.
Shadowplay is a brisk and enjoyable enough read, and, understandably, author James Swallow would choose to kick off the range with a deep dive into the show’s most compelling character. Swallow uses the book to explore Straker’s enduring guilt about the tragedies that tore his family apart (depicted in the TV series), and the whole resolution of the story pretty much turns it into a sequel to one of the show’s late-period pacier Pinewood-filmed episodes. But fans of UFO’s impressive arsenal of classic Anderson hardware – Moonbase, the Interceptors, Skydiver etc – and its broader supporting cast might feel a little short-changed by the book’s fixation on Straker to the exclusion of almost everyone and everything else bar the sinister Dr Jackson (played with relish on TV by the late Vladek Sheybal).
Shadowplay delivers a welcome return to the world of one of Gerry Anderson’s most enduring shows but perhaps any follow-up could be a traditional UFO story featuring more of the show’s familiar faces and a bit more full-on SHADO action.
UFO: SHADOWPLAY is available from www.gerryanderson.com
