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Radio writer and producer Charles Chilton—best known for the 1950s pulp sci-fi radio series Journey into Space—died on 2 January 2013, aged 95.

Leaving school at the age of 14, Chilton—by then orphaned—joined the BBC as a messenger. Within a year, he was an assistant in the BBC gramophone library, allowing him to indulge his passion for jazz. He later became part of the BBC Variety department, presenting his own music show on radio called Swing Time. In 1937 he formed the BBC Boys’ Jazz Band.

After wartime service with the RAF in Sri Lanka (where he helped run Forces Radio with David Jacobs, later a star of Journey into Space and prominent BBC producer), Chilton became a BBC producer responsible for programmes presented by Desert Island Discs creator Roy Plomley and Michael Bentine, among others.

A spell in the US in the early 1950s saw Chilton produce Riders on the Range, a series about the history of the American West that ran for five years. He also wrote comic strips for the educational British comic The Eagle, and was a producer on the ground-breaking Goon Show (working again with Bentine).

However, it is for the epic and imaginative sci-fi radio drama Journey into Space that Chilton will be remembered. The shows ran between 1953 and 1958 and consisted of three series—Journey into Space (1953-54, retitled Operation Luna when re-recorded in 1958 after the master tapes were lost), The Red Planet (1954-55) and The World in Peril (1955-56). The series was the last radio programme in the UK to achieve higher ratings than the then relatively new medium of television.

The series chronicled the adventures of the heroic Jet Morgan, and his side-kicks Doc Matthews, Mitch MItchell and Lemmy Barnet. The show took off along with the launch of the rocket Luna in the fifth episode, reaching heights of eight million listeners each week. The rediscovery of the lost ‘transcription discs’ allowed for repeats and home releases of the series in the 1980s, and led to several sequels including 1981’s The Return From Mars, 2008’s Frozen in Time (in which David Jacobs took over the role of Jet Morgan, who is preserved and awakened in the future like Buck Rogers), and 2009’s The Host (with Toby Stephens as Jet Morgan)—all written by Chilton. Chilton also wrote three novels loosely based on the three original Journey into Space series, and scripted a Jet Morgan comic strip for The Express newspaper between 1956 and 1957. In 1984 and 1985 Chilton returned to sci-fi radio drama with Space Force and Space Force II, a pair of adventure series closely modelled on Journey into Space.

“Space was in the air [in the 1950s],” recalled Chilton in a recent interview. “Lots of people sent in scripts for a space series and the BBC turned ’em all down and then one day [Head of Light Entertainment] Michael Standing sent for me and said ‘I’d like you to write a space series.’ So I said, ‘Space? I don’t know anything about space.’ He said, ‘But you write a serial every week.’ I said, ‘That’s cowboys.’ He said, ‘Anybody that’s able to write cowboys must be able to write space.’ So I said, ‘Well, all right, I’ll have a go.’ So I joined the British Astronomical Society. I studied the sky for a bit and after about six months I started this new thing called Journey into Space which was a much bigger hit than the Western.”