Fanny Cradock for First Contact: Turquoise Meat in Spaced Out (1979)
On Saturday night I was watching an old episode of Harry Hill's TV Burp on the legendary Rewind TV (seriously, I love the sheer randomness of what this channel dredges up: last year my dad and I stumbled across León Klimovsky's The Vampires' Night Orgy, a film we still laugh about now, largely thanks to the finger in the stew and one of the villagers being repurposed as dinner) when Norman J. Warren's Spaced Out came on next, a tonal shift of some magnitude.
"Oh great," I thought, a Norman J. Warren film I haven't seen. Knowing Warren mainly through Satan's Slave, Terror, Prey and Inseminoid, I naturally assumed this was another horror or science fiction film that had somehow passed me by. However, it became abundantly clear within about five minutes, certainly by the point at which a bespectacled shelf-stacker was having a wank on a bench behind a strategically positioned copy of Bouncers, that we were actually in softcore sex comedy territory.
This could have made for slightly awkward family viewing, except that none of us are especially prudish and my parents are long accustomed to the strange directions an evening's television can take when I'm around. Staying over comes with an unwritten clause: there will be dinner, a catch-up (likely slagging someone off), and at some point I may accidentally subject the household to 1970s British sexploitation.
I have to say, not much in Spaced Out held my attention, beyond the training room, where a weaponised mannequin arm on a tripod serves as a robot fencing machine against a wall populated by silhouettes of assorted alien creatures. Spindly things, clawed things, something with far too many legs: tantalising evidence of a much more bizarre intergalactic population than the three conventionally glamorous humanoid women the film actually gives us. Alas, rubber monsters cost money and are considerably less useful to a British sex comedy whose principal interest lies elsewhere…
There were however other things to enjoy in the production design, including what looks remarkably like Ubald Klug's olive-green DS-1025 Terrazza sofa for de Sede, a great cascading landscape of leather cushions that had already done time in Logan's Run, alongside an enormous black, white and green beanbag broad enough to swallow an adult man whole.
My favourite thing in the film, though, was inevitably the food. I love unusual on-screen catering, and Spaced Out duly delivered. Dinner for the humans arrived courtesy of Glory Annen on roller skates, dressed somewhere between an air hostess and a majorette, carrying what looked like Fanny Cradock catering for first contact: a great turquoise joint surrounded by purple potatoes and a scoop of electric-blue coleslaw. And, apparently, turquoise meat wasn't strange enough, so they randomly decided to flambé it. God, love whoever was in charge of that production detail.
Anyway, that's really the joy of Rewind TV, isn't it? You can put it on with no particular expectations and come away with an image of Glory Annen on roller skates serving flambéed turquoise meat. Can't wait to see what oddity I'll stumble across next week. Will it be another sex comedy where everyone is naked by the five-minute mark, another Spanish village with a worrying attitude to catering, or something suitably demented, probably featuring a sinister clinic and a lobotomy or two?
