UFOs. What the hell are they? Well, as Chris Moyles recently pointed out to Robbie Williams, they’re Unidentified Flying Objects. That’s right, by definition, if we knew what they were, they wouldn’t be UFOs, so stop pretending you, like, know anything about them, right.
Back in the distant past (the 50s, 60s, and 70s), when everyone who looked up into the sky and saw something they didn’t recognise (eg a planet, a star, a plane, another plane, yet another plane) and seemed to think
They’d seen a flying saucer
We’d want to know they’d seen a flying saucer
the US air force decided to investigate the reports everyone filed – at great cost to the US taxpayer. The investigation was called Project Bluebook and after years of work, found absolutely nothing to prove that UFOs=flying saucers from beyond the seventh galaxy.
Presumably to reassure the US taxpayer that all the effort and money spent on looking for aliens during those heady days of gas crises and stagflation wasn’t wasted, the USAF agreed to help produce a TV series dramatising some of these investigations. It was called Project UFO.
The basic format was as follows:
Some dweeb out in the backwoods somewhere sees something that looks like a spaceship
He or she reports it to USAF
Two USAF officers (different depending on the show’s season) turn up at the scene of the sighting
They find strange stuff
They ask around town to find out what kind of dweeb they’re dealing with
An entirely plausible rational explanation for the sighting presents itself
They go back to their base and report their inconclusive results
In a major sop by the producers to wacko UFO believers, the USAF officers suddenly realise they’d overlooked something and it was probably a flying saucer from beyond the seventh galaxy after all
And that’s basically every episode for two seasons. Nevertheless, to impressionable people like seven-year old MediumRob, it was absolutely terrifying and convincing since it was "based on real events". Now? Not so much.
Anyway, the show, to give itself an air of verisimilitude, had a lengthy, wordy intro title sequence explaining its ‘truthful’ origins. But the titles were creepy arsed construction diagrams of UFOs that people HAD DEFINITELY SEEN. DEFINITELY. OH YES. YES, THE ALIENS DID HAVE THE FACES OF HORSES. IT’S TRUE.
Behold then, the weird old title sequence for Project UFO. Don’t have nightmares.
Of all the shows arriving on our screens over summer, the surprise big hit has been Royal Pains. A charming comedy-drama about a New York ER doctor who ends up working as a ‘concierge doctor’ to the rich of the nearby Hamptons, it’s as languid as a Long Island iced tea, with no big pyrotechnics, no screaming melodramas, only MacGyver-esque medical procedures and reasonable people having relatively normal relationships – against the general insanity experienced by the rich.
While it hasn’t avoided the occasional escape from reality and House-ian "bizarre diseases of the week" to diagnose, it has remained whimsical fun with a compelling cast throughout. With a second season now assured and with so many sub-plots coming to a head, a cliffhanger ending was inevitable. What was surprising is that the creator of Charmed and the show’s exec producer Constance M Burge managed to avoid Wiccans for a whole season – until now.
