The comedy blockbuster Airplane! and the BBC’s Doctor Who both owe their existences to one hour of Canadian television from the 1950s? And all with a helping hand from Star Trek’s Scotty? Surely you can’t be serious!? Paul Hayes explains…

With Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary upon us, many will be looking back to 1963 to search for the roots of the Time Lord’s adventures. But actually, for the moment which perhaps started the whole process, you have to go back a little further – and to a certain infamous plane journey on which some dodgy meals were served.

On the evening of April 3 1956, Continental Airways flight 714 takes off from Toronto, bound for Vancouver. During a stopover in Winnipeg the plane is joined by last-minute passenger George Spencer, who mentions to the doctor sitting next to him that he flew fighters in the air force a decade ago. For dinner, there’s a choice between lamb and salmon – after which disaster strikes, when everyone who had the fish comes down with debilitating, life-threatening food poisoning. This includes both the pilot and the co-pilot, leaving Spencer having to take the controls as the only person with even a vague chance of being able to land the plane successfully.

This was the plot of a television play called Flight into Danger, an episode of the General Motors Theatre anthology series shown on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s young TV service, which in April 1956 was just over three-and-a-half years old. If the story sounds familiar, then there’s a good reason. Flight into Danger provided the template for numerous remakes across the world, culminating 24 years later in Airplane!.

But the play also has other legacies – and forms an evolutionary link between two of the most famous science-fiction series ever made. Starring as Spencer in Flight into Danger was James Doohan, who a decade later found lasting fame as Montgomery Scott, the chief engineer in Star Trek. But it is also likely that if the play had never taken flight, then over on the other side of the Atlantic Doctor Who would never have come into existence.

“The show hit a new high in realism in TV drama,” The Albertan newspaper stated in 1956. “It was, by all odds, the ultimate in Canadian dramatic effort on the tiny screen.” Flight into Danger’s achievement is all the more remarkable considering that, like most television plays at the time, it was broadcast live. However, a film recording was made of that live transmission – probably to enable the Toronto-based production to be shown on Canada’s west coast later in April. This means that the play still exists today; it also enabled it, back in 1956, to be shown in September that year by the BBC in Britain.

While it’s possible that the surviving copy may have had any major mishaps edited out, it seems to have been a very slick and successful live production. There are no technical disasters, and any minor dialogue slips from the cast merely come across as naturalistic in the high-pressure nature of the story.

The original intention for the BBC screening of Flight into Danger appears to have been for them to produce their own local version of the script. However, either as part of the sales pitch or as a guide for how they felt the play should be staged, the CBC sent them a copy of the film recording. The BBC were evidently so impressed with this that they abandoned their remake plans and arranged to show the original instead.

It’s difficult to overstate just how much of an impact Flight into Danger made in the UK. By their own calculations, the BBC found that it had the joint-highest audience appreciation figure for any play they had ever screened. The press reviewers were equally keen – and also quick to use the play as a stick with which to beat the BBC.

The Guardian’s review declared it “one of the best television plays ever shown.” The Northern Daily Mail suggested that “the BBC should get some technicians into Canada as quickly as possible… A few more productions like this would act as a shot in the arm for British television drama…” The Liverpool Echo felt that “The BBC should study the crisp presentation of the play from Toronto with a view to putting a little similar zip into the home product.”

The Bradford Observer, meanwhile, criticised the BBC’s then-Head of Drama Michael Barry for having given what they felt was a slightly patronising on-screen introduction to the broadcast: “If Flight into Danger is a typical example of CBC productions, then it is the BBC Drama Department that should be wondering whether seniority alone allows it to be quite so complacent.” The BBC were impressed enough to buy dozens of further plays from the General Motors Theatre strand, showing them over the next two years under the banner title of ‘Canadian Television Theatre’.

Flight into Danger did, however, have a certain amount of British talent behind-the-scenes – both the writer Arthur Hailey and the play’s director, David Greene, were UK ex-pats. As was common at the time, though, Greene is actually credited as the ‘producer’. What we might now think of as the programme’s producer was the CBC’s drama boss, who ran the whole General Motors Theatre strand, and unlike Hailey and Greene he was a natural-born Canadian. His name was Sydney Newman.

Seven years later it was Newman who, as BBC Television’s Head of Drama, would initiate the creation of Doctor Who and, alongside his colleague Donald Wilson, came up with the basic format for that series. But Newman would almost certainly never have been there in the first place were it not for Flight into Danger.

That BBC screening of the play hadn’t only impressed the critics; others in the British television industry took note, too, of both Flight and the subsequent CBC plays imported by the BBC. “That’s how I got to England,” Newman told an interviewer in 1986. “My name was up [in the closing titles] every week – ‘Sydney Newman, Supervising Producer’.”

In the summer of 1957 Newman visited Britain for the first time. Towards the end of the trip he was invited to a meeting with representatives of ABC, one of the franchisee companies of the new ITV network. Newman then came back to Britain later in the year to meet ABC’s boss, Howard Thomas, and sealed a deal to move to the UK and work for them.

In his 1977 memoirs, Thomas explained why he had been keen to recruit the Canadian. “I had been enthralled by Flight into Danger… I made enquiries and found that the producer was Sydney Newman, a man with a reputation for choosing topical subjects and then schooling writers to turn these into television scripts…”

Newman joined ABC as their Head of Drama in April 1958. He personally took over producing their flagship Sunday night play series Armchair Theatre, where he would really make his name in British television. He also co-created The Avengers, which became one of the best-known British drama series of the 1960s.

That success at ABC saw the BBC approach Newman in the autumn of 1961 to become their new Head of Drama to succeed Michael Barry. ABC refused to release Newman from his contract until December 1962, but when he did make it to the BBC his impact on the UK television industry would become even greater.

Flight into Danger itself also had a much longer afterlife than most other television plays. The CBC were able to sell it not only to the BBC, but to American television too – although, unlike on the BBC, the version shown by the NBC network in the States in September 1956 was a remake with a new cast rather than a re-broadcast of the original.

In 1957 it was adapted again, into a feature film with another new set of actors. Called Zero Hour!, the main character was renamed ‘Ted Stryker’, and this more treacly version of the story was extended by having Stryker’s family aboard the plane and giving him post-traumatic stress disorder – about which nobody seems terribly sympathetic.

A novelisation of Flight into Danger was also published in the late 1950s, and in 1961 a serialised radio reading of this was broadcast on the BBC Home Service. The following year the BBC finally made their own television version, and the 1960s also saw adaptations for German and Australian television. Another American adaptation appeared in 1971 with the TV movie Terror in the Sky, but the best-known legacy of Flight into Danger came in 1980 when Zero Hour! was in turn remade as Airplane!, the parody which has long since overshadowed all serious versions.

James Doohan did not, however, begrudge his friend and fellow Canadian actor Leslie Nielsen gaining international stardom in Airplane!. “Terrific!” he enthused of the film to an interviewer in 1994. “We’re really good buddies – I have helped him, and he has helped me, in the early days… He’s just a fabulous guy.”

Airplane!’s success may have blotted out memories of the original, but there’s no doubting the legacy of Flight into Danger. Both in helping to propel Doohan to Hollywood and then more fantastic flights aboard the starship Enterprise, and in sending Sydney Newman across the Atlantic and into British television – to launch voyages not just into space, but into time as well. None of which might ever have happened had it not been for the story of Flight 714, on which both pilots had the fish.

 

Paul Hayes is the author of Pull to Open: The Inside Story of How the BBC Created and Launched Doctor Who, available now from Ten Acre Films