Another Time, Another Place

There is a premise at the heart of Space:1999 that its makers may not have fully understood they were making. On 13th September 1999, nuclear waste stored on the Moon explodes, and the Moon is torn from Earth's orbit. Moonbase Alpha — 311 people — goes with it. The Earth remains. It is not destroyed. It is simply no longer reachable.

This is not a story about catastrophe in the conventional sense. The catastrophe has already happened, quietly, before the series begins. It happened when humanity put its waste somewhere out of sight and called that a solution. The explosion is just the moment the bill arrives.

What follows — across 48 episodes, two series, 1975 to 1977 — is not a story about getting home. It is a story about people learning to live without the certainty of home. Koenig commands. Russell heals. Bergman thinks. Maya transforms. And at the end of each episode, two or three of them stand at a curved window in a room that was designed with extraordinary care by people who believed the future deserved that care, and they say something true, and they look out at whatever is out there, and the episode ends without resolution.

That is the hospice posture. Not fixing. Not accelerating toward the next thing. Accompanying.

Vanessa Andreotti writes that modernity is dying, and that what it needs is not reform or replacement but the kind of honest, careful attendance we give to things that are ending. The hospice metaphor is precise because it resists both optimism and despair. It says: this is real, this is happening, and the work is to be present to it without flinching, without rushing it toward either recovery or death.

Space:1999 was doing this in 1975 without knowing the language for it. The show was made by people at the height of their craft — Brian Johnson building miniatures that would train the hands that later built the Millennium Falcon; Keith Wilson designing interiors that took modularity seriously as a philosophy, not just an aesthetic; Barry Gray writing music that was Wagnerian in its insistence that what was happening mattered. These were people who believed the work deserved their full attention. And what they made, at full attention, was a meditation on displacement. On the condition of being carried away from what you knew, through no fault of your own, into an open dark that offered no guarantees.

The waste was always there. The explosion was always coming. The Moon was always going to go.

A boy in Frodsham in the late 1970s absorbed this without language for it. He also absorbed, from the same years, the sight of jet contrails over Cheshire, the sound of American voices on an airband radio talking to Shannon Oceanic, the impossible beauty of a McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 parked beside a wire fence in Speke. These things arrived together — the Eagle transporters crossing a television screen, the TriStars crossing the actual sky — and they formed something in him that took decades to name.

What they formed was an attachment to modernity's most beautiful expressions, held alongside a knowledge, not yet articulable, that those expressions were part of something that was passing. The DC-10 is no longer made. The TriStar is museum pieces. Speke — the town that modernity conjured from flat fields and then abandoned — did not recover from the systems that left it. And Space:1999 never got its third series, because the audience that had grown up enough to understand what Series 1 was really about was too small, and the machinery of television wanted something brighter and faster and easier to sell.

Andreotti's framework gives permission to hold all of this without resolving it. To say: I loved these things. They were real. Their passing is real. The grief is not weakness or nostalgia — it is the appropriate response to genuine loss. And the love does not require the pretence that what was lost was perfect, or that it should have lasted, or that its ending was someone's fault.

The waste was always there. We knew, somewhere, that the Moon would go.

On the evening of 1st July 1977, a retired police sergeant came home to Hunts Cross, Liverpool. He had registered his father's death that morning at the Liverpool Register Office on Brougham Terrace. He had called at the offices of Pearson Collinson Funeral Service, 91 Allerton Road, to arrange the funeral for the following Tuesday. He had done what needed doing, in the order it needed doing, with the addresses.

His name was Reginald Ransford Bird. He was forty-seven years old. He had been holding his father's hand the night before, in a hospital bed, until George passed away quietly. Then he had taken a taxi home, gone to inform his mother, and the following morning obtained compassionate leave from the Police.

Now he was home. His wife Edna made tea in the kitchen. The radio was on — something familiar, worn in, not new. George Harrison's voice, perhaps, steady and generous: All things must pass. None of life's strings can last. The children were somewhere in the house. The day was done.

In the front room, the television was on. It was 1977, and Space:1999 was part of the landscape of British television — Series 1, Series 2, repeats, the schedules erratic and overlapping. On the screen, Moonbase Alpha moved through the dark. People displaced from home, learning to live without the certainty of home, standing at curved windows and saying something true and leaving it unresolved.

Reg watched, or half-watched, in the way you watch television on the evening after the hardest day. He would have said he was just sitting down. He would not have said he was doing anything as large as grieving. He was a police officer. He knew how to write a statement. He also knew, in a way he would not have articulated, that the facts were sufficient. The feeling was in the record itself.

Across the Mersey, over the water, in a seventies semi on the edge of a market town in Frodsham, Cheshire, his nephew was six years old and watching the same screen. Not the same television. The same show.

The boy might not yet have known his grandfather had died the night before. He knew the Eagles, and the dark, and the people at the window. He knew it mattered, without knowing why.

He is writing this now. Forty-nine years later, from a window in Oxton, Birkenhead — the ground George Bird came from, the ground Reg left in 1938 and has now, somehow, returned to. The record Reg spent twenty years making is live on the web, readable by something that didn't exist when he made it. The Moon is still going. The people are still at the window.

All things must pass. And some things, read carefully, come back.

Rhodia1 is built in this register. Not as a lament, not as a museum, but as a practice of careful attention to things that deserve it — a working-class biography from Edwardian Birkenhead, a playlist assembled in a blank canvas flat in Amsterdam during a difficult season, a photograph of a child on the floor of an office where people were trying to make the seen world accessible to those who could not see it. These things are held here with the same seriousness that Keith Wilson brought to the Moonbase interiors. Because they deserve it. Because the work outlasting the worker is the measure of success, and the worker must be named.

The show's title card — Another Time, Another Place — sits in Helvetica on black, the Moon centred, photographic, real. No illustration. No comfort. Just the fact of it, in the right typeface, at the right scale, with nothing added.

That is the correct register. That is what it means to hospice something with dignity.

The Moon carried away 311 people and kept going. The record of what they were, and where they came from, and what they loved — that is what remains. That is what Rhodia1 is for.