How many people remember hiding behind the furniture when Dr Who was on? For those folk, and for the brave young things of today,  stay with us as we connect Dr Who, Star Trek, Hammer Horror, Basil Brush and the worst space helmet ever. Yes, our mid-week post is aimed at people who like weird sixties TV and movies.

The longdogs are busy disembowelling the living room. Django has one chair nearly down to the springs, and Chilli is pulling stuffing out of the sofa, so they won’t be joining us today.

After interviewing Dan Starkey of Strax and Carnacki fame last time (the starkey stratagem), we had a Dr Who moment, and went back to some of the scary stuff we watched during childhood. And as we’ve already mentioned sofas (fabulous link, eh?), we’ll start with the hiding thing.

One particular moment of paralysing fear remains with me from the sixties – watching William Hartnell’s Dr Who. Even I was young back then. The curtains were drawn, and I was crouched at the back of the living room, peering over a cushion at the TV set, because an unseen creature had said something along the lines of “We are too hideous for you to gaze upon!”

My innocent little organs immediately supplied a surge of horror which I can still remember. And companion Vicki had screamed, because there were triangular partitions of cloudy glass surrounding her, and you could just see a pair of eyes through them…

At that age I tried to imagine what was “too hideous to gaze upon”, and did quite well. I was so scared that I didn’t even shout out that it should have been “too hideous upon which to gaze”. They weren’t that awful, of course, but it was a great build-up. In fact, they were Rills, like this fellow:

I survived, and in the intervening years, I’ve bought pints for people who looked worse than that. For the inner nerd, the story was Galaxy 4 (1965), a four parter in which the Doctor and his companions landed on an arid planet where they met the beautiful Drahvins and the hideous Rills. The Rills were friendly, compassionate explorers, and the Drahvins were clone warriors who got what was coming to them.

Glad that’s been sorted out after all these years.

And Dr Who leads us on to Peter Cushing. We tripped over an oddity at the weekend, and we love that sort of thing. You will, of course, know that Peter Cushing played Dr Who in the films Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks- Invasion Earth (1966).

A year later, he was Baron Frankenstein in the Hammer Horror film, Frankenstein Created Women (1967). A slight mood change in this version, as the film dwells more on psychology than surgery. Frankenstein re-models and re-animates the body of a disfigured young woman, Christina, with predictably unhappy results (Hammer fans may also want to check our recent feature spawn of the ripper: the true story)

Who else was in the film, you ask? Christina was played by Susan Denberg, who you may not know, as she did little acting. She was born Dietlinde Zechner in 1944, and was a Playboy Playmate the same year that Daleks – Invasion Earth came out. But lo and behold, one of her only other roles was in the episode of the original Star Trek series, Mudd’s Women, in which she played Magda Kovacs.

That’s not much of an oddity, you say? Then we unveil for you – Derek Fowlds. Every greydogtales listener will immediately know him as the man who played second dandy in Frankenstein Created Women. As Johann, a young blade, he taunts the disfigured Christina – and pays the ultimate price when Christina is brought back by the Baron.

As Mr Derek in the Basil Brush show on UK TV, Fowlds was beloved of millions, who laughed to his antics as a bemused secretary to a pompous, self-important boss. No, hang on, that was Yes Minister. More importantly, in the same year as he starred in Frankenstein Created Woman, he made the pilot show for Solarnauts, which is our real oddity (at last).

This is a lovely piece of naff sixties TV which could only have been improved by the addition of some proper decimal places. For some reason Fowlds keeps saying things like “Three over six” and “Five over seven”, as if he’d been set some fractions to work out while he was reading the script. Nevertheless, it’s 25 minutes of pure sixties fun, including:

• endless corridors marked with identical triangles, some of which paralyse you so that you can be put into a tube – yet they also work on the baddies, who don’t seem to know their own base;
• handguns which ‘transitise’ their targets, which is like being paralysed but with more special effects;
• a woman whose space helmet is thoughtfully shaped like a flapper girl’s hat to distinguish her from the jolly tough guys;
• a super-villain who can do almost anything, except when the good guys are punching his goons and ruining his entire plan, when he stands around for a while picking his nose (or something).

Fowlds plays the thrilling character Tempo, who with his companion Power takes on the might of Logik. They win, by the way. It’s complete rubbish, in an enjoyable sort of fashion (apart from the sexism), and we’re not hugely surprised that it didn’t get picked up.

It was, however, produced by Roberta Leigh, who had already made the superior SF marionette drama Space Patrol, another childhood favourite. The galasphere (spaceship) went round and round like a spinning top, so you could play Space Patrol at primary school and annoy the teachers. We only had one and a half teachers at the village school, but we did our best.

So we liked the puppets more, but as this is greydogtales, we’ll let you make up your own minds. First, Solarnauts:

And then Space Patrol.

It might have been worth mentioning that Thunderbirds also had solarnauts in it, in the episode Sun Probe, but that would have been going too far. And their solarnauts had ridiculously bushy eyebrows. At least Derek Fowlds had his facial hair under control.

So we’ll ignore that, and bid you adieu for now.

Next time: Some serious William Hope Hodgson. Or Torchwood and Roger Zelazny. We can’t decide. And there are more author and artist interviews in the pipeline…