Alternative 3 is a 1977 British television mockumentary concerning government conspiracies. It inspired much speculation and interest by proponents of fringe ideas. It has been compared to Orson Welles' radio production of The War of the Worlds, as both were science fiction programmes, not intended to alarm the public, that were misinterpreted as legitimate. The former had a far greater immediate effect.
Premise
Purporting to be an investigation into the UK's contemporary "brain drain", Alternative 3 describes a plan to make the Moon and Mars habitable in the event of climate change and environmental catastrophe on Earth.
Production
The script was written by David Ambrose. Music was supplied by Brian Eno, a portion of his score being released on his album Music for Films (1978). Apart from the presenter Tim Brinton, all characters were played by actors who were explicitly credited at the end. It was made with film stock used at the time to make it appear like a conventional documentary programme. In a 1989 interview, actor Richard Marner (who plays Dr. Carl Gerstein) said he did not rehearse his lines to make the delivery appear as natural as possible.
Broadcast
The programme was presented as an edition of an Anglia series Science Report. The intended transmission date was 1 April, but it seems that Anglia was unable to obtain an ITV network slot for the programme on that date due to strike action or labour disputes.
Having aired once in the United Kingdom, Alternative 3 was later aired in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The programme was originally meant to be aired on April Fools' Day 1977, but its broadcast was delayed to 20 June. Alternative 3 ended with credits for the actors involved in the production and featured interviews with a fictitious American astronaut.
The interviews with supposed scientists, astronauts, and others were far too dramatically polished to have been spontaneous, and in any case, the episode's closing credits named the actors who took the roles of interviewees and correspondents. Though artfully produced, the show's counterfeit documentary style could scarcely have been expected to fool many. As an Anglia TV spokesman put it, 'We felt viewers would be fairly sophisticated about it.'"
Plot
The program begins by detailing the so-called "brain drain": a number of mysterious disappearances and deaths of physicists, engineers, astronomers, and others in related fields. Among the strange deaths reported was that of "Professor Ballantine" of Jodrell Bank. Before his death, Ballantine had delivered a videotape to a friend in the press, but upon playback the tape appears to contain only static.
The missing scientists are revealed to have been involved in a secret American-Soviet plan. Interplanetary space travel had been possible for much longer than was commonly accepted, with Bob Grodin, a fictional Apollo astronaut (Shane Rimmer) claiming to have stumbled onto a mysterious lunar base during his moonwalk.It is then revealed that, during the 1950s, scientists had secretly determined that the Earth's surface would be unable to support life for much longer, due to pollution leading to catastrophic climate change. In 1957, physicist Dr Carl Gerstein (Richard Marner) proposed three solutions. The first was the drastic reduction of the human population on Earth. The second was the construction of vast underground shelters to house government officials and a cross section of the population until the climate had stabilized, a solution reminiscent of the one proposed at the finale of Dr Strangelove. The so-called Alternative 3, revealed to have been secretly undertaken, was colonization of Mars via a way station on the Moon.
The program ends with some detective work; acting on information from Grodin, the reporters learn that Ballantine's videotape requires a special decoding device. After locating the decoder, the video documents a joint American and Soviet landing on the Martian surface in 1962.. We see the landing on Mars, but the camera focuses on an unknown organism moving under the surface of the ground. According to an astronaut, "We are in Mars and we have life."