Guest Artists/Additional Cast
Dave Prowse as the Creature
John Hug as Bill Fraser
Albin Pahernik as Space/Kreno animal
Writer
Charles Woodgrove
Director
Robert Lyn
Background
In August 1976, having completed filming on thirteen episodes of 'Space:
1999's second season, stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain were entitled to take a two week break. Under pressure to
complete filming on all 24 episodes before the end of the year, Anderson and Freiberger were understandably reluctant to close
down production while their two leading actors went on holiday.
The solution was 'The Beta Cloud', an episode specifically written by Freiberger (using his pen name
of Charles Woodgrove) to minimise Landau and Bain's involvement by focusing the action on Catherine Schell, Tony Anholt and
the other members of the regular cast. Landau and Bain completed their scenes for the episode within a few days and
then left for a fortnight in the South of France as they were not required for further filming until the next pair of 'double-up'
episodes, 'Space Warp' and 'A Matter of Balance'.
Preparation for filming on 'The Beta Cloud' coincided with the announcement
of a mandate from ITC's president Abe Mandell that the series should feature more monsters, which were, apparently, "all the
rage" in the United States. In order to satisfy Mandell, Freiberger developed 'The Beta Cloud' around the idea of one
such monster rampaging through the base, and then rewrote the subsequent scripts to include various monster appearances.
Unfortunately, the cost of producing completely new monster costumes for each of these episodes
was prohibitive so the costume created for the Beta Cloud monster was modified to appear as a Space Animal in 'Space Warp',
the Thaed in 'A Matter of Balance' and the Laren in 'The Bringers of Wonder - Part Two'. Ironically, after filming only
five such 'monster-enhanced' episodes, Mandell told Anderson and Freiberger to drop the monsters from subsequent episodes
as the tastes of American viewers had changed and "monster were out".
Taken from Year Two Dvd Booklet
Copyright Carlton
