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michael_gothard_archive“About a year and a half passed between my first important film part in Herostratus and my next big break – Out of the Unknown – a television series.”
Petticoat interview 6 October 1973
In "The Machine Stops", the first film in the BBC's second "Out of the Unknown" series, Michael Gothard plays a young man, Kuno, who wishes to break out of a restricted and lonely existence, in a future subterranean dystopia. Yvonne Mitchell plays his biological mother, Vashti.
Photo taken in 1966 by John Timbers.
Kuno tries to get permission to father a child, and to visit the earth's surface, but all his requests are blocked. He eventually finds his way out on his own, and sees a girl living there, but the machine kills her.
At the end, the machine fails, and everyone in the future civilisation dies.
Original Air date: 6 Oct. 1966.
From the Radio Times: 29 September 1966
A NEW THURSDAY SERIES – 9.30 BBC 2
Yvonne Mitchell in tonight’s play, The Machine Stops
One of last season’s BBC 2 drama successes was the science fiction series Out of the Unknown. Tonight the series returns with a strong opening presentation, The Machine Stops, a dramatisation of an E. M. Forster story by film director Clive Donner and classical scholar Kenneth Cavander.
The production has other claims to distinction as well – the appearance of Yvonne Mitchell in a central role and the fact that Philip Saville (of Exit 19 fame) directs.
The Machine Stops is really an Edwardian view of the future. (The sets and the special effects in this production emphasise this by depicting a very Edwardian concept of a future age.)
Forster saw – sooner than many writers of his time – the long shadow of the machine age beginning to fall on civilisation; typically he was concerned with its threat to personal relationships. In tonight’s play, a mother, played by Yvonne Mitchell, and her son (Michael Gothard) struggle to maintain their natural bond of love in an over-civilised world in which human beings have become tyrannised by machines.
This is just the first of many fascinating and compelling productions you can see in this series.
Reception:
The Daily Telegraph described Philip Saville’s production as visually inventive and the dialogue as unusually distinguished.
The Guardian: It might have been written today newly for television.
The Daily Sketch: A stimulating start to a series which deserves your attention as a regular date.
Award
This adaptation of 'The Machine Stops' won the first prize at the Fifth Festival Internazionale del Film di Fantascienza (International Science Fiction Film Festival) in Trieste, on 17 July 1967. This was the first time the BBC had entered for the Festival.
The film appears on the BFI collection, "Out of the Unknown", a 7-disc box set of DVDs.
IMDB entry
Petticoat interview 6 October 1973
In "The Machine Stops", the first film in the BBC's second "Out of the Unknown" series, Michael Gothard plays a young man, Kuno, who wishes to break out of a restricted and lonely existence, in a future subterranean dystopia. Yvonne Mitchell plays his biological mother, Vashti.
Photo taken in 1966 by John Timbers.
Kuno tries to get permission to father a child, and to visit the earth's surface, but all his requests are blocked. He eventually finds his way out on his own, and sees a girl living there, but the machine kills her.
At the end, the machine fails, and everyone in the future civilisation dies.
Original Air date: 6 Oct. 1966.
From the Radio Times: 29 September 1966
A NEW THURSDAY SERIES – 9.30 BBC 2
Yvonne Mitchell in tonight’s play, The Machine Stops
One of last season’s BBC 2 drama successes was the science fiction series Out of the Unknown. Tonight the series returns with a strong opening presentation, The Machine Stops, a dramatisation of an E. M. Forster story by film director Clive Donner and classical scholar Kenneth Cavander.
The production has other claims to distinction as well – the appearance of Yvonne Mitchell in a central role and the fact that Philip Saville (of Exit 19 fame) directs.
The Machine Stops is really an Edwardian view of the future. (The sets and the special effects in this production emphasise this by depicting a very Edwardian concept of a future age.)
Forster saw – sooner than many writers of his time – the long shadow of the machine age beginning to fall on civilisation; typically he was concerned with its threat to personal relationships. In tonight’s play, a mother, played by Yvonne Mitchell, and her son (Michael Gothard) struggle to maintain their natural bond of love in an over-civilised world in which human beings have become tyrannised by machines.
This is just the first of many fascinating and compelling productions you can see in this series.
Reception:
The Daily Telegraph described Philip Saville’s production as visually inventive and the dialogue as unusually distinguished.
The Guardian: It might have been written today newly for television.
The Daily Sketch: A stimulating start to a series which deserves your attention as a regular date.
Award
This adaptation of 'The Machine Stops' won the first prize at the Fifth Festival Internazionale del Film di Fantascienza (International Science Fiction Film Festival) in Trieste, on 17 July 1967. This was the first time the BBC had entered for the Festival.
The film appears on the BFI collection, "Out of the Unknown", a 7-disc box set of DVDs.
IMDB entry
