Hypnogoria: Invisible Man

Growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s it was always exciting when we got a new sci-fi TV show from over the pond. We always assumed we were getting the cream of the crop, but we got many series that only survived for a season. And so this week on One From the Vaults, we are looking back at some of these short-lived shows, which might have only had a handful of episodes, but cult TV fans still fondly remember. Although admittedly not always for the best of reasons...

We start with series from 1976 called The Gemini Man. Launching with a feature length pilot episode on 23rd September 1976, this show was very loosely inspired by The Invisible Man by HG Wells. However this was not a show about mad science, rather it was an adventure series featuring a spy who could turn invisible, a premise that previously had been used for an earlier series called The Invisible Man starring David McCallum. Likewise, The Gemini Man starred by another familiar face, Ben Murphy, fresh from three seasons of popular series Alias Smith and Jones.

The show centred around a secret agent Sam Casey (played by Murphy) who was caught in a radioactive blast which rendered him permanent invisible. However boffins at the super secret spy agency Intersect devised a DNA Stabiliser, which looked suspiciously like a digital watch, which would return him to visibility. However his magic watch also had another feature - it would allow him to turn invisible for fifteen minutes, a very handy ability for a secret agent, and a fantastic plot device to use every week. However there was of course a catch, and that was if he exceeded the quarter of an hour time limit he would not only be permanently invisible but also permanently dead.

And while that sounds like a bit of cheap gimmick now, it was very timely, as interestingly, 1976 was the year digital watches became affordable and cheap, with Texas Instruments releasing a watch that retailed at just under twenty dollars.

However it seemed that a weekly countdown on a digital watch just wasn’t quite exciting enough for viewers, and hence after only five episodes were shown, poor ratings made The Gemini Man disappear forever. Well, almost forever…

For the series had been picked up by the BBC in the UK, and began airing in October 1976. And over here, The Gemini Man was met with a much warmer welcome, and throughout the winter of 1976/77, all eleven episodes that had been made were aired. And up and down the land, that Christmas kids were pestering their parents for a digital watch with a stop watch function so they could play The Gemini Man.

Indeed the series was popular enough to spawn an audio adventure LP from Power Records, a hardback annual book for Christmas 1977, and in 1978, a year after it had finished showing, there was a Gemini Man colouring book and a sticker book too. later still in 1981, The Gemini Man would return briefly to TV again, in the shape of TV movie entitled Riding with Death, however this was just two episodes of the show cobbled together. Sadly however there was never an official Gemini Man digital watch, and I can’t help feeling they missed a trick there…