To you and yours, a very good one.

Here’s a little something for fans of the outlandish and uncanny. BBC4’s documentary series on British science fiction, The Martians and Us, can now be viewed online. Part one, Apes to Aliens, takes evolution as its theme and traces a brief and entertaining history, from H.G. Wells’ anonymous time traveller to John Wyndham’s unearthly schoolchildren. The three-part series covers the obvious and the obscure, the inspired and the unhinged, and teases out what has often made British science fiction different from, and darker than, its American cousin.

Here’s a taste.

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Part 2, Trouble in Paradise, and part 3, The End of the World as We Know It, are also online. Well worth watching. (h/t, The Thin Man.) Related: The original 1960 trailer for Village of the Damned. And here’s George Sanders having trouble keeping secrets.   

Further to this and this, here’s a third clip from the BBC’s Planets series, taken from the episode Moon. Here, Farouk El-Baz explains how Apollo astronauts honed their geological skills – and how a sizeable piece of Flagstaff, Arizona, was given a radical lunar makeover.

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More background here and here. The entire Planets series can be downloaded here.

Further to Friday’s post on The Planets series, here’s another short extract, taken from the episode Atmosphere. In it, we follow Joe Kittinger’s 1960 balloon ride to an altitude of 103,000 feet (20 miles / 32 km), where, technically, he became the first man in space. Thanks to automated cameras, we also follow Kittinger’s unorthodox – and perilous – return to Earth. Extraordinary.

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Parts one through six of The Planets can be viewed online here.

Related. And. Also. (H/T, The Thin Man.)

Via The Thin Man, here’s an extract from the first episode of the BBC’s acclaimed documentary series, The Planets. Broadcast in 1999, the series remains one of the most lavish and comprehensive accounts of astronomical discovery and space exploration, with previously unseen archive footage, most notably from Russia. There’s also a memorable score by Jim Meacock. Recommended.

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The first two episodes, Different Worlds and Terra Firma, can be viewed in full and downloaded here. Subsequent episodes should be posted over the next few days.

Sponsor my research. Those orbital weapons platforms won’t build themselves.