I was too young to remember the first series of Journey into Space.
It was broadcast during the autumn of 1953 into the January of the following year, when I was just four.
And by the time that last series finished in the February of 1957 I would have been watching the telly with mother, leaving dad in the kitchen with the old coal stove, and the wireless to listen alone.
My Wikipedia tells me that “Journey Into Space is a BBC Radio science fiction programme written by BBC producer Charles Chilton. It was the last UK radio programme to attract a bigger evening audience than television. Originally, four series were produced with the fourth a remake of the first...... Chilton later wrote three best-selling novels and several comic strip stories based upon the radio series”.*
I can’t claim to have read any of the books but followed his comic strips in the Eagle Comic, and a full 40 years ago I got a tape of the first series which at times sounded hammy and a bit stilted but took me back to that kitchen, the wireless and Dad.
So that is it, leaving me just share those memories of the 1950s, and the adventures on the Home Service of Captain Andrew “Jet Morgan”, Doctor Daniel “Doc” Matthews, Stephen “Mitch" Mitchell and Lemuel “Lemmy” Barnet.
With just one extra, and that is a reflection on Pan Books. Long before l started on Penguin and Pelican paperbacks l was an avid reader of Pan. The company offered up a range of novels often with striking or lurid front covers.
And that in turn was thanks to mother and an English teacher at Samuel Pepys who picked up loads of second hand paperbacks which were left for us to dip in into.
Leaving me just to include this book on the Roman Invasion by Leonard Cotterell bought my mum in 1961 when l was 11 and still in the collection.
Location; My childhood
Pictures; cover of Journey into Space, circa 1954, and the Great Invasion, 1961
*Journey into Space, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_into_Space
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