Prisoners of Gravity
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Greetings prisoners of gravity, this is Commander Rick...
Prisoners of Gravity was perhaps one of the most intelligent and thought provoking television shows ever created to explore the medium of speculative fiction (ie. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Comic books, etc), not to mention being creative and stylish on a limited budget. Produced by TVOntario, the show was the brainchild of Mark Askwith, Daniel Richler, with the host being Rick Green (of The Frantics fame). The series aired 139 episodes over 5 seasons from 1989.
As told through an introductory comic-strip like opening sequence drawn by Ty Templeton, the premise held that a fan of speculative fiction becomes alarmed by news broadcasts describing the alarming state of the world and decides "I must escape". Building a rocket booster for his Camaro Z-28 (pronounced "zed twenty eight") he takes off... only to collide with a communications satellite. Commander Rick was not to be daunted by this fate. Instead he, with the help of an organization called Control and the onboard NANo CYbernetic computer (NANCY), took advantage of his unusual situation to hijack every week the broadcast of `Second Nature' to discuss issues as seen through the eyes of authors and artists of speculative fiction.
Every week he would interview a gamut of authors, artists, with filmmakers, animators and the occasional futurist. Topics that were discussed ran the gamut: Censorship, Adaptations, Heros & Superheros, Humour, Alternate Histories, Mars, Cyberbooks, Sex... Each episode was a half hour long (a full half hour, being public television) and usually about 6-14 authors/etc were interviewed. 600 or so interviews were conducted and aired by the time the show's run came to an end.
During its run, the list of authors interviewed became more and more prestigious, including Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Frederik Pohl, Clive Barker, David Brin, Charles de Lint, Robert J. Sawyer, Michael Dorn, Spider Robinson... to name but a very, very few.
What really brought each episode alive was how it was fully wrapped in its quirky premise. The visuals, background sounds and onscreen graphics gave a good sense of `being there', without being overblown, or chintzy looking. Rick's smooth delivery helped a great deal as well. Its not quite possible to convey how it felt in words, but when Rick jammed an audio tape into a jurry-rigged video device, it didn't seem forced nor phoney.
The show was unfortunately cancelled in 1994 for reasons that aren't quite known, despite its growing success.
Clips of this show are included with the CD-ROM in newer editions of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by John Clute.
External links
- Prisoners of Gravity page (http://www.sfwriter.com/pog.htm) on Robert J. Sawyer's web site
- Signal Loss (http://www.teddog.com/pog/), a Prisoners of Gravity fan site
- Prisoners of Gravity page (http://www.geocities.com/canadian_sf/pages/media/prisoners.htm) on a web site about Canadian SFTemplate:Tvseries-stub