Out of the Unknown | |
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Created by | Irene Shubik |
Theme music composer |
Norman Kay (series 1 -3) Roger Roger (series 4) |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Original language(s) | English |
No. of series | 4 |
No. of episodes | 49 (list of episodes) |
Production | |
Producer(s) |
Irene Shubik(series 1 & 2) Alan Bromly (series 3 & 4) |
Camera setup | Multi-camera |
Running time | c. 60 minutes per episode (series 1) c. 50 minutes per episode (series 2-4) |
Release | |
Original network | BBC 2 |
Picture format |
625 line (576i) PAL 4:3 Monochrome (series 1 & 2) Colour (series 3 & 4) |
Audio format | Monaural |
Original release | 4 October 1965 – 30 June 1971 |
Out of the Unknown is a British television science fiction anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and broadcast on BBC2 in four series between 1965 and 1971. Each episode was a dramatisation of a science fiction short story. Some were written directly for the series, but most were adaptations of already published stories.
The first three years were exclusively science fiction, but that genre was abandoned in the final year in favour of horror/fantasy stories. A number of episodes were wiped during the early 1970s, as was standard procedure at the time. A large number of episodes are still missing but some do turn up from time to time; for instance, Level Seven from series two, originally broadcast on 27 October 1966 was returned to the BBC from the archives of a European broadcaster in January 2006.
Irene Shubik began her career working on educational films for Encyclopædia Britannica Inc in Chicago. Returning to London, she joined ABC Television as a story editor on the anthology series Armchair Theatre, under producer Sydney Newman in 1960. Shubik had been a science fiction fan since college, and in 1961 approached Newman with a proposal to create a science fiction version of Armchair Theatre. This became Out of this World, a sixty-minute anthology series hosted by Boris Karloff that ran for thirteen episodes between June and September 1962. Many of the episodes were adaptations of stories by writers including John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick.