My Parents Are Aliens
| My Parents Are Aliens | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Created by | Andy Watts |
| Starring |
Tony Gardner Carla Mendonça Barbara Durkin Danielle McCormack Alex Kew Charlotte Francis Olisa Odele Stephanie Fearon Jessica Woods Daniel Feltham Katie Pearson Jake Young Danny Robinson |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| No. of series | 8 |
| No. of episodes | 106 (list of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) |
Cosgrove Hall Films Yorkshire Television |
| Running time | 23 minutes |
| Distributor | ITV Studios |
| Release | |
| Original network |
ITV Network (CITV) Nickelodeon) |
| Original release | 8 November 1999 – 18 December 2006 |
My Parents Are Aliens is an award-winning British children's television sitcom that was produced for eight series by Cosgrove Hall Films for Yorkshire Television and aired on ITV from 8 November 1999 to 18 December 2006.
The show primarily followed the lives of three orphaned children: Mel, Josh, and Lucy Barker, and their new foster parents Brian and Sophie Johnson. The children soon discover that the Johnsons are in fact aliens from the planet Valux, who crash-landed on Earth when Brian tampered with the controls of their spaceship. As shown by the opening credits, the house they live in is actually a morphed form of their spaceship. They also have the ability to morph into other people. Brian and Sophie start out with a very limited and muddled knowledge of life on Earth, and the children must do their best to help them acclimatise. No one outside the family must ever learn that they are aliens, or they will be taken away for scientific testing, and the Barkers will lose another set of parents. The humour in the programme is surreal and sometimes gently subversive. Whilst being a children's show, it occasionally makes reference to rather mature matters, high-brow culture, and complex scientific thinking; and because of this it has also gained a considerable following of older viewers outside of its intended age range.
The show was filmed in Studio 4 at The Leeds Studios. A laugh track was added from series 4 onwards, although there were complaints that it spoiled the feel of the show. The last episode of series 7, Thanks for all the Earthworm Custard, was the final one to feature the original regular cast, and concluded ongoing plots from the first seven series.
Despite the conclusive nature of the final episode of series 7, the show returned for an eighth series. The new plot acted as a clean slate for the show, with Brian and Sophie crashing their ship again and taking in a new family of foster children after having their memories of the past seven years erased by Guido, the new avatar of the galactic guidebook. The new family, the Bennetts, were very similar in personality to the Barkers and CJ. However the new status quo was not to last long, as in 2006, it was announced by ITV that they were to close its in-house children's production unit, bringing the show to a sudden end following series 8.
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