Category: Astronauts

The astronauts try to get accustomed to their new home, the Orbital Workshop space station, which doesn’t quite have all the amenities of home. For one thing, there’s a video camera in the “waste management compartment”, and there’s also the logistics of where to walk Bimbo the dog in space. Mattocks and Ackroyd try to come to terms with being bunkmates, whether it’s Ackroyd’s habit of listening to music at bedtime, or the fact that Mattocks expects to hear chickens…in orbit.

written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie
directed by Dick Clement

Cast: Christopher Godwin (Mattocks), Carmen Du Sautoy (Foster), Barrie Rutter (Ackroyd), Bruce Boa (Beadle), and Bimbo (himself)

Notes: The description of the space station going through an entire day in 90 minutes is actually scientifically accurate. The International Space Station, for example, experiences a “sunrise” approximately every 90 minutes in low Earth orbit.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Beadle arranges for the loved ones of the station crew to talk to them briefly; Mattocks gets to speak to his wife (who naturally asks – as she does on Earth – if he’s keeping his sleeping quarters clean), Ackroyd gets to speak to his mother (much to Mattocks’ amusement), and Foster gets to speak to…no one. She then makes the mistake of revealing that her engagement fell apart before the mission launched, something she decided to keep quiet. Now that she’s aboard a space station with two men, revealing this piece of news is probably not the best idea.

written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie
directed by Dick Clement

Cast: Christopher Godwin (Mattocks), Carmen Du Sautoy (Foster), Barrie Rutter (Ackroyd), Bruce Boa (Beadle), Mary Healey (Valerie), and Bimbo (himself)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

As the crew come to the realization that everything, even their time in the bathroom, is being monitored by the ground (and to some extent made public), they decide that a revolt is in order. But since they can’t exactly leave the station and go somewhere else, they decide to simply disappear from sight, and suddenly Beadle has to explain why the crew is missing.

written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie
directed by Dick Clement

Cast: Christopher Godwin (Mattocks), Carmen Du Sautoy (Foster), Barrie Rutter (Ackroyd), Bruce Boa (Beadle), and Bimbo (himself)

Notes: Astronauts is based on a fictionalized version of the Skylab space station, and its writers may have been inspired by events that took place aboard the real Skylab. The third crew of American astronauts to visit Skylab staged a mutiny of their own, bringing the schedule of scientific experiments to a halt to get NASA’s attention on the ground until a less grueling schedule could be agreed upon.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

On the occasion of the crew’s 50th day in space, they’re annoyed to find that no one on the ground is marking the occasion with them, and they demand that Beadle secure some media coverage of this milestone. In the meantime, Ackroyd reveals that he’s turned the laboratory module into a still, and shares his home-brewed rum with Mattocks and Foster, and all three proceed to get sloppy drunk. It is naturally, at this time, that Beadle tells them they’ll be on the News at Ten mere minutes from now.

written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie
directed by Dick Clement

Cast: Christopher Godwin (Mattocks), Carmen Du Sautoy (Foster), Barrie Rutter (Ackroyd), Bruce Boa (Beadle), and Bimbo (himself)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Foster and Ackroyd gradually become aware that Mattocks is keeping things from them, and so is Beadle. The two are exchanging scrambled, coded messages during the overnight hours. When answers are demanded of Mattocks, he tries to stall his crewmates with a cover story, before finally giving in and revealing that he is taking spy photos from orbit, monitoring both Soviet and American military movements. Worse yet, Mattocks’ dossier for “Project Sparrowhawk” includes contingencies for everything from an attack by enemy spacecraft to “survival priorities”, and Ackroyd threatens to scuttle the whole mission and reveal all to the world if the spy project isn’t shut down.

written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie
directed by Dick Clement

Cast: Christopher Godwin (Mattocks), Carmen Du Sautoy (Foster), Barrie Rutter (Ackroyd), Bruce Boa (Beadle), and Bimbo (himself)

Notes: Astronauts finally grudgingly steps into the modern space age when Ackroyd says that the food resembles “reject towels off the Space Shuttle” (which, by the show’s 1983 airdate, had already undertaken its first orbital test flights, whereas Skylab, the inspiration for the show’s fictional space station, had fallen out of orbit in 1979). This is an unusually topical episode, but it dealt with a topic that had been a reality since the 1960s. Various actual Soyuz missions had been thinly disguised military spy missions from orbit, while the United States Air Force had planned (but ultimately cancelled) a manned military space station in the ’60s called Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), and the U.S. Department of Defense had plans for entire Shuttle missions devoted to classified “national security” tasks (including spy satellite deployment).

LogBook entry by Earl Green

On the eve of his wedding anniversary, Mattocks becomes obsessed – thanks in no small part to his crewmates egging him on – with talking to his wife, which would end a months-long ban on the crew receiving news of their families and personal lives left behind on Earth. When Ackroyd receives word that his divorce has been finalized, Mattocks begins worrying about the state of his marriage since he’s been in orbit.

written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie
directed by Dick Clement

Cast: Christopher Godwin (Mattocks), Carmen Du Sautoy (Foster), Barrie Rutter (Ackroyd), Bruce Boa (Beadle), Mary Healey (Valerie), and Bimbo (himself)

Notes: This episode states that Mattocks and the others have been in space for four months.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

As the crew deals with the latest equipment failure, an unfamiliar voice is heard over their air-to-ground radio link: a Soviet cosmonaut has piloted his Soyuz capsule within a mile of the space station, and is trying to contact them. To nearly everyone’s amazement, Foster knows enough Russian to respond and maintain a conversation (including a bit of long-distance chess). Paranoia begins to seize Mattocks and Ackroyd about their Russian-speaking crewmate, though the only thing more disturbing than a chatty cosmonaut sharing the sky at close range is when he falls silent.

written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie
directed by Dick Clement

Cast: Christopher Godwin (Mattocks), Carmen Du Sautoy (Foster), Barrie Rutter (Ackroyd), Bruce Boa (Beadle), Jeffrey Wickham (Rudy), and Bimbo (himself)

Notes: Suddenly, Astronauts has continuity – mention is made of “Project Sparrowhawk” from two episodes ago, and the fact that tensions are running high in the Cold War on Earth – and a bit of peaceful politics.

LogBook entry by Earl Green

With just one week to go before the mission’s end, Mattocks is seized by a sudden profound belief in God, and even confesses that, during the initial launch to the space station, he has no idea how he saved himself and his crewmates from certain doom. He now attributes this – and just about everything else – to the Almighty. Ackroyd, in the meantime, is growing more and more depressed, not wanting to return to Earth at all. And this leaves Foster to worry that neither of her crewmates may be fit for the journey back to Earth at all.

written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie
directed by Dick Clement

Cast: Christopher Godwin (Mattocks), Carmen Du Sautoy (Foster), Barrie Rutter (Ackroyd), Bruce Boa (Beadle), and Bimbo (himself)

Notes: The crew has been in orbit for 5 months, 23 days at the beginning of this episode

LogBook entry by Earl Green