I know I saw some of the original transmissions, but I don't remember very much about them. (I'd have been about five at the time.) I must have expressed some appreciation at the time, since my parents bought me a Space: 1999 annual and a toy Eagle Transporter. Nothing in the subsequent year, so it's clear that I must have moved on to a new craze very quickly.

And that's pretty much how it stayed for 15 years. The general critical consensus was that Space: 1999 had been awful. Here's what Roger Fulton has to say in The Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction: "...the show was marred by po-faced acting, wildly implausible plots, one-dimensional characters and an almost total lack of warmth and humour". Armed with only a few vague childhood memories, and an admittedly very nice Dinky toy, I wasn't in a position to disagree. The fact that I could barely recall the series meant it couldn't have been any good, could it?

The early eighties saw ITV repeating many of the Andersons' puppet shows, which were fun for their nostalgia value, and of course the models and special effects were always fantastic. Terrahawks arrived, and the less said about that, the better. Space: 1999 was but a distant glimmer, and I was by now fairly convinced that it was as appalling as the critics said. I retained far stronger memories of UFO, ten years or more after I'd last seen an episode, and somehow regarded it as the Andersons' single greatest work. (When my local ITV region started a late night rerun in 1987, I was relieved and gratified to discover that it really was as good as I remembered.)

But Space: 1999 was now no more than a footnote in my memory, tagged as the series where the Andersons lost it big time. A chance encounter with a second series repeat when I was on holiday once (different ITV region, you see...) did nothing to revive my interest. Mind you, it was The Rules of Luton - but I didn't know any better then...

And then it happened. It was 1992. Thunderbirds had just been repeated again, and had become a phenomenon with a whole new generation of kids. Suddenly, Gerry Anderson was a star again, and he set off on a lecture tour to talk about his career. This tour took in my local arts centre, so I decided to go along. He talked about the various shows he'd made, illustrated by clips. Naturally this included Space: 1999, although the clip he showed wasn't much to write home about - just the first season title sequence and a basic scene in Main Mission. This shouldn't have been enough to awaken my interest in the series.

The back of the lecture programme had an advert for videos, including Space: 1999. I don't know what possessed me, but the next day I went into town and bought the first four tapes. I really had no idea what to expect. For a start, the first episode wasn't on the first tape (because of some complicated release rights arrangement, as I later discovered). Fortunately, I knew enough about the series background to appreciate the basic situation.

The episodes that were released were put out in a seemingly random order, which meant that I saw The Infernal Machine, Dragon's Domain, The Testament of Arkadia and The Troubled Spirit right at the beginning of my exposure to the series. I really couldn't ask for a better introduction to Space: 1999. I was hooked. Within days, I had watched and re-watched my four tapes, and was anxiously awaiting the release of subsequent volumes.

I can't really describe why Space: 1999 has had such a profound effect on me. It's not as if it's my favourite programme - that's Doctor Who; it's not even my favourite Gerry Anderson series (which is UFO). But there's something totally compelling about Space: 1999, which makes it the one series that goes back into the video time after time - (so much so that my tapes have practically worn out - fortunately, it's now been released on DVD, and looks even more fantastic than ever!). There are certain works of art which grab you on a fundamental level - because they seem so atypical of their particular medium or genre, you're simply unable to conceive of them being done that way. So when you finally come across them, it's such a revelation that it affects the way you look at the medium from then on. Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! did this for me in the medium of film, and The Fall's album Perverted by Language did it in pop music. Space: 1999 was, for me, just such a cultural epiphany.

I'm talking about the first series of course. None of the show's powerful effect on me could survive the drastic and mindless changes foisted upon the second series. In fact, for years, I refused to have anything to do with the second series. I didn't buy any of the videos. I'd only ever seen that one episode, and that was bad enough. Everything I'd heard and read about the second series convinced me that it was an unmitigated disaster. (You may well detect a certain irony here - since it was just such secondhand opinions that coloured my perception of the first series for years. I'd been proved gloriously wrong there - might it not happen again...?) I dithered for several years over whether to buy the videos - and in the end, I couldn't quite bring myself to part with the money. Then the BBC started to repeat the show, and I was able to see the second series for myself. There are a few exceptions, but mostly my worst fears were confirmed - so I'm glad I saved some money there!

This site is a guide to Space: 1999, but not a conventional episode guide with cast lists and plot summaries. Instead, I want to try and examine the effect the show has had on me, so I'll be looking at each episode from my own personal perspective - and hopefully sharing with you just what has driven me to build the site in the first place! The Episode guide page will explain how I intend to go about that. I'll be gradually reviewing each episode, and uploading each one as it's complete - so bear with me, this is very much an ongoing project...